Doctoral Candidate Ilaria Pinzo
Ilaria Pinzo is a doctoral candidate in Classical and Modern Literature at the University of Heidelberg, pursuing her PhD with a comparative thesis titled “Ovid-Calvino: Six interpretative Memos for the Metamorphoses” (“Sechs Interpretationsvorschläge für die Metamorphosen”). The aim of this doctoral project is to further develop the Italian author’s germinal thoughts on Ovid’s main work into well-founded research in literary criticism.
In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), Italo Calvino develops an idea of literature that insists on six fundamental qualities being common to every great work: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity and Consistency (unfinished). Calvino follows in the footsteps of some of the most influential authors in antiquity and modernity to address these six qualities of literature, which he hopes will influence the literary works of the future. Among the authors mentioned in this work there is one whom the Italian writer particularly values and in whose masterpiece all the characteristics of literature theorized in the Six Memos are present: this author from the past, loaded with future perspectives, is Ovid.
Calvino offers brilliant interpretive insights into the Ovidian Metamorphoses based on these qualities of literature. Although the Italian author only notes the presence of some of these basic features in Ovid's work, his vision nevertheless allows for a new perspective from which to view the Metamorphoses in unexpected, surprising ways. Calvino's work is intended to serve as a compass for better orientation in what is still unexplored in Ovid's work and to help find innovative interpretive keys to gain a new understanding of the Ovidian poem.
