Livia, Diva Augusta, Dea Cerere. Sul dupondio coniato dall’imperatore Claudio nel 42 d.C.

R. Brancato (a cura di), Città e territorio nel Mediterraneo antico. Studi offerti a Edoardo Tortorici, 2023

Nella lunga e stupefacente storia della divinizzazione imperiale, il culto delle Augustae di Nerone segue, inesorabilmente, la sfortunata sorte del loro promotore. Tuttavia, le fonti letterarie, epigrafiche, papirologiche, numismatiche e iconografiche non lasciano dubbi sulla effettiva istituzione a Roma di santuari per le divae Poppea Augusta e Claudia Virgo che si potrebbero ricercare nel contesto topografico e architettonico della domus Aurea.

EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2022

Marlowe’s ‘translation’ of Book 2 of the Aeneid (Aeneas’ lengthy «tale to Dido» in Act 2 of Dido Queen of Carthage) has often been dismissed as a tour de force in the art of dramatic soliloquy. This neglected speech however plays a pivotal role in the symbolic architecture of the play as Marlowe turns the whole tale of the fall of Troy into a most powerful ‘literalisation’ of the love metaphors that frame Aeneid 4 (Virgil’s proper ‘tragedy of Dido’): thus, through Ovid’s elegiac poetry, Helen’s (figurative and literal) flames in Marlowe’s Troy are a proleptic key to interpret Dido’s tragedy of destructive love. However, Marlowe’s play with Virgil’s ornatus in Aeneas’ monologue proves even more intricate than that. There are in fact other literary echoes in the furor imagery of Aeneid 4 that Marlowe subtly manages to reactivate and dramatize in his tale of the death of Priam (a passage that seems to be very important for Hamlet too as he instructs the players at Elsinore). The intertext that serves to twist Virgil’s imagery, this time, comes from a rather unexpected tragedy, one very far from Troy, but very close to Dido, read through the all-important parodic lens of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But, as is often the case with Marlowe, this makes us reconsider our interpretation of Virgil’s poetry as well and its fundamental role in understanding Ovid’s poetry.

ROMA E IL MONDO ADRIATICO. DALLA RICERCA ARCHEOLOGICA ALLA PIANIFICAZIONE DEL TERRITORIO. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Macerata (18-20 Maggio 2017), a cura di Roberto Perna, Riccardo Carmenati, Marzia Giuliodori Edizioni Quasar, 2022

Some literary and epigraphic sources seems to suggest a link between biographical aspects of Livia and Hadrian and the goddesses Bona Dea and Cupra. Retracing some significant episodes of their personal and familiar lives, this study seeks to explain the reasons for the particular interest they showed in raising the cults of the two goddesses. Adopting this perspective could help to better evaluate the incidence of the private and public factor in certain atti- tudes that are quickly defined as “programmatic”. The attitudes of Livia and Hadrian will also be examined in the light of the contacts between Rome and the places on the Adriatic of which they were originally from.

The subject of the study is a devotional miscellany published in Milan in 1639 as the work of a «devout religious», but which can be attributed with certainty to the authorship of the Jesuit Gregorio Ferrari (1580-1659): a figure at the centre of the religious ferments of the city's community, whose commitment to the spiritual direction of nuns and lay penitents in search of perfection was already known. Based on the continuous alternation between poetic inserts and an apparatus of exegetical-edifying commentary in prose, the corpus of material offered by the Cetra delle divine lodi was intended to meet the support needs of a heterogeneous public, which found particularly strong agreement in the female devotee world, as documented by significant documentation on the fortune the text had known.

L’Escalina, IV, 1, 2015