A journey – via Venice, Lugano, Berlin, Aix en Provence, New York and Venice again – into Carpaccio’s fragmented body of work. A journey through stories, myths, methods and ideas; an adventurous and fervent journey. A journey into Carpaccio’s work that is part of a cycle on painting (M. Serres has written about other painters: Poussin, Vermeer, Latour, Turner, Bonnard, and on sculpture), which in turn is part of a cycle on art, in an even larger cycle on the form of mental production. These are the patient stages of a long journey undertaken more than twenty years ago. All of Serres’s philosophy is presented in the form of a journey, a journey full of the passions and tribulations of Hermes/Mercury, god of crossroads. Hermes passes everywhere in space and time, between the formal and physical sciences, from their birth in antiquity to their current state; he crosses the critical pass that separates and unites the “hard” sciences and the humanities; sciences, stories and myths; sciences, art and the history of religions. Each stage corresponds to a book or part of a book, in the cycle entitled Hermes e altrove (Hermes and elsewhere). As the movement proceeds, the picture becomes more coherent. A global image emerges as an open promise. Is it perhaps that of a modern-day philosophy?