As part of the celebrations for the Ovidian bimillennial, studies on the reception of the poet of Sulmona are enriched by a new volume: developing a line of research opened in 2005 by T. Ziolkowski in Ovid and the Moderns, U.’s volume addresses two aspects, in some respects particularly consolidated in Ovidian scholarship: on the one hand, ‘sono prese in esame le riscritture letterarie (in prosa e in poesia) e gli adattamenti teatrali e cinematografici del poema maggiore [le Metamorfosi], di cui si è avuta una vera e propria fioritura nell'ultimo quarto di secolo’ (p. 17); on the other, the Ovidian theme of exile, from which five contemporary novels were born: Dieu est né en exile (1960) by Vintilă Horia, An Imaginary Life (1978) by David Malouf, Sulle rive del Mar Nero (1992) by Luca Desiato, Il diario di Ovidio (1997) by Marin Mincu and Die letzte Welt (1998) by Christoph Ransmayr.

These two elements occupy the second (‘Le “Metamorfosi” dell'incertezza’) and third chapters (‘L'esilio di Ovidio e la condizione postmoderna’) respectively, while the first chapter is dedicated to Ovidian scholarship and the contemporary discourse surrounding Ovid and his reception. The book ends with a useful, rich and up-to-date Ovidian bibliography, which together with the precise historical overview of the criticism of Ovid from 1945 to 2017 will help the reader to move in the variegated, multiform, interdisciplinary world of Ovidian scholarship.

U. is a Classical philologist, the author of a valuable philological and critical-interpretative commentary of Fasti 3.1–516 (2008) as well as of several contributions on the influence of Classics on modern literature. The methodology of the book follows this path, rooted in historical-philological analysis, in thematic criticism (e.g. love, exile and metamorphosis) and in the measured use of intertextuality. The main thesis of the book, which U. emphasises on several occasions in the introduction, is to verify on the textual level the cultural impact that the work of Ovid can still have in postmodern culture and its role in the production of a contemporary narrative, in particular in the construction of European identity: ‘L'eredità greco-latina in particolare, oltre a costituire uno dei due pilastri fondamentali, accanto a quella ebraico-cristiana, della civiltà europea, ha svolto storicamente, nei confronti di quest'ultimo, un peculiare ruolo di costante stimolo e confronto … Per questo, in un momento di grave crisi e radicale messa in discussione del progetto di maggiore integrazione tra i Paesi dell'Unione, è importante rilanciare l'impegno della cultura e della ricerca sulle tematiche della permanenza del classico e del ruolo che essa svolge nella definizione dell'identità culturale europea’ (pp. 13–15).

U.’s horizon, therefore, is by no means merely literary: to rediscover Ovid means to tackle at a trans-historical level some themes that have endured throughout the history of Western Europe without interruption. If on the one hand this feeling is one of the strongest points of the book, on the other it has led to the decision not to use the theory of literature or the most recent methodologies (phenomenology above all, as seen in the work of C. Zoll and H. Vial) to read the forms of continuity and discontinuity of Ovid's reception in the modern age. On the other hand, and here lies the strength of U.’s work, the descriptive approach to Ovid and European culture offers its readers a considerable amount of data – even if in the first chapter U. traces a history of Ovidian scholarship in part already known – to be able to enter the mare magnum of U.’s book, that is, the ‘liquid modernity’ of which Ovid is both form and figure.

In the second and the third chapters U. studies and discusses a rather high level of textual samples that confirms, to quote N. Holzberg, the existence of a ‘neues Ovidzeitalter’ (cf. N. Holzberg, ‘Ein neues Ovidzeitalter’, in Ovid. Dichter und Werk [1998], pp. 11–13). The intention of U. is clear: taking up the words of S. Hinds (in ‘Defamiliarizing Latin Literature, from Petrarch to Pulp Fiction’, TAPA 135 [2005], 49–81, at 79), U. not only wants to tackle the ‘forms and modes [of] classical memory’, but also to answer some groundbreaking questions: ‘quale idea della poesia di Ovidio, e delle Metamorfosi in particolare, esse presuppongono o esprimono?’ (p. 118). Although U.’s first attempt at Ovidian historicising begins with a classification in the second half of the twentieth century of the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) – whose allegiance to certain poetics still remains uncertain even in German Studies –, he balances the relationship between the classics and the moderns with thoroughness, always providing explanations on the genesis of the works as well as useful bio-bibliographic information of the authors examined. The approach is certainly descriptive, and the use of aesthetic categories such as ‘postmodern[ism]’ would have required a more grounded theoretical and/or philosophical contextualisation in order to be used more clearly, but the analysis of the ‘Ovidian rewritings’ is consistently rigorous and full of ideas, both when the modern text acts according to de-familiarising modules of both Ovid's poetry and poetics, and when it mostly adheres to the Ovidian tradition. In general, U. writes, in these rewriting modalities we can identify some constants: ‘la prima è di ordine forma e strutturale: la nuova età ovidiana propone un Ovidio per frammenti, spesso disomogenei tra loro e non sempre riassemblati in un complesso organico (un Ovidio ‘decostruito’, per certi aspetti)’ (p. 249); secondly, ‘un'altra costante che lega – ora più, ora meno esplicitamente – quasi tutte le opera analizzate è il presupposto sul quale esse si fondono in quanto riscritture di un modello classico, vale a dire il carattere, per così dire, intrinsecamente “moderno” della poesia ovidiana’ (p. 250).

The final chapter is devoted to the ‘principali romanzi che, nel periodo considerato (1945–2017), sono stati dedicati all'esilio di Ovidio nel Ponto’ (p. 257) and aims to answer the following questions: ‘quale idea dell'esilio come condizione esistenziale esso esprime o presuppone? In che modo e in che misura l'interpretazione della figura e dell'opera di Ovidio si ricollega – se vi si ricollega – alle principali correnti della coeva critica ovidiana?’ (p. 258). The latter part is strongly influenced by Ziolkowski, but, compared to Ovid and the Moderns, U. emerges from the exquisitely literary boundaries of that work to find, in the thematic and intertextual Ovidian tracks, another ‘Ovidio, più propositivo e costruttivo’, a bearer of ‘profondi’ meanings and values that marks the Metamorphoses, along with the Aeneid and the Homeric poems, as ‘il testo classico che più di ogni altro contribuisce a definire – e, nel tempo, costantemente a rimodellare – l'identità culturale europea’ (p. 332).