Fiction runs through all discourses, especially those that have reality as their object. Some will even say that there is nothing real, that everything is a story. This is what the ever-renewed spokesmen of skepticism have repeated over and over again, since antiquity. But even if the narratives of real events are full of fiction, a longing for the truth survives, in any case. Ivana Costa delves into the history of fiction: its birth in the forge of Greek philosophy, its expansion in chronicles and other genres about real events that flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and its blurred footprint in fake news. It also explores the transformations of the idea of reality: from Atlantis to Robinson Crusoe, from Nietzsche to images of the black hole. His question in this book is twofold: why, in a world saturated with fiction, would it make sense to look for something real, and what kind of objectivity should authors and readers who resist the imperative of disbelief aspire to.

In Once upon a time there was something real. An essay on philosophy, facts and fictions, the author demonstrates her talent for combining philosophical rigor and erudition with the narrative rhythm typical of the greatest stories. In other words: he manages to turn his investigation into a truly passionate plot.