Nature and Landscape of Italy in Roman Culture from Augustus to Trajan

The Project focuses on Nature and Landscape, regarded as opposing poles in a fundamental dialectic in the Roman world, within a time frame that encompasses two pivotal moments for the development of imperial culture, i.e. the regimes of Augustus and Trajan. Nature and Landscape will be examined with particular regard to Italy, considered as both a geographical and political entity and an ideological model in the growing context of the empire. The Project seeks to adopt a new integrated methodology. This will enable scholars of Latin literature (including Classical Reception), archaeologists, ancient art historians, and scholars of human geography to share their expertise in order to define a theoretical (and methodologically accessible) overview and to produce concrete results within their respective areas of competence in an overall cooperative approach. The research will thus produce philological and interpretative works on fundamental Roman authors and their reception; analyses of the territory (especially Latium and Venetia) carried out with geocritical methods and supported by GIS technology (with potential outcomes in terms of social and cultural impact for territorial development); and various specific works in the fields of archaeology, topography and ancient art history.