• summer at MAXXI L'Aquila • talk + music A lesson on Ovidby Edoardo Prati

Through love, imagination and self-expression, the figure of the famous poet from Sulmona emerges in all his modernity.

Giacomo da Lentini would say that writing love poems is a survival strategy, much like a sailor throwing ballast overboard during a storm to avoid shipwreck. Many authors have devoted their lives to this need and this sentiment, but not Ovid. Ovid’s love poetry is one of the many forms in which the poet, not yet twenty, practised his art. His experimentalism and the variety of his themes offer us the chance to reflect on something deeper: a man who did not devote himself to love in order to recount it, but a man who transforms every experience into literature.

We take a journey through his words, so powerful that they have echoed for centuries between the lines of all European literature, and let us see the faces of those who have taken him as their mentor. Let us follow the swirling threads of his imagination to understand how one might create a different scenario when the world around us is falling apart. Page after page, we do not discover the work; we discover the man, Ovid, who managed to turn his life into literature.

The evening is enhanced by a solo piano performance, inspired by Ovid and dedicated to Philip Glass’s opera Metamorphosis.

speakers
Edoardo Prati student and creator

accompagnamento musicale
Paolo Canale piano

Under the patronage of the Municipality of L’Aquila and with the support of ALES. In collaboration with the “Alfredo Casella” Conservatory of Music.