sibylla cumana

sorry i know i've complained about this a lot but if there was One thing i wish people on here would grasp wrt roman approaches to mythology. is the centuries and centuries of italian mythic tradition & transmission that existed here. like a lot of these myths were being told & transformed & developed local version before rome even existed. these guys were trading materials & traditions with the greeks since like the bronze age. a person in rome might of have heard a lot of these stories as a kid from their grandmother who heart it from her grandmother, who heard it from hers etc etc. they were living changing myths in italy! with their own variations even! so a roman author, while they DO extensively use greek literature, is nevertheless working off something that is a deeply embedded part of their culture too. to act like these ideas were just transplanted directly from 5th century athens to 1st century rome, and especially as if greece had the oral tradition while rome was purely literary, is silly

more specific to the aeneid but like when i read takes on here sometimes it becomes really apparent that people don't realise that aeneas & the story of aeneas coming to italy has an incredibly long tradition in italy going back for centuries before vergil was even born. like vergil didn't just pick up the iliad one day & make all the rest of that up, we have literary & material sources for this going way back. of course vergil did change things in his telling of it, and he was working within an epic literary tradition in which he works heavily off of homer in style and substance but this is an very old italian story he's developing!

festa della repubblica oggi spero abbiate lasciato un po' di latte e biscotti per mattarella

If you ever see me in love again shoot me

the worst part about moodswings are when i know i'm being irrational over something so i have to sit there and seethe.

sexual thrill at the mere prospect of cataloging things in a database

(in the middle of a heartfelt conversation, with concerning sincerity) and dont forget that I am evil, and that my death will be announced with singing in the streets

There is something deeply bittersweet about getting so invested in the life and works of someone who is long gone. You read about them, you collect informations, you think you know them, but your knowledge will always be incomplete. We base our perception on what we have, which sometimes is not very much. You cannot know how they really looked like (if they lived before the invention of photography) or how their voice sounded. A million little details you would like to know. You can grasp something of their lives if you are lucky enough to have personal objects, diaries, letters preserved... but even then it's not enough. They lived, they breathed like you do, and now they are gone. You both walked on the same earth but there are centuries separating you. There is a certain ache in that.

this meeting could have been a beloved folktale passed down orally thru generations

i wish we could have like a doctor who van gogh scene but with dante alighieri. oh what i'd give to be able to revive him one last time just to take him to any literature/linguistics class to make him hear a professor talk about how determining and instrumental he was for our language and its history to the point of being universally considered the father of the italian language and by extention of italy. how his hopes for the potential of vernacular would come true. how crucial his arguments in de vulgari eloquentia were for italian linguistics. how the divine comedy spread so far in the whole country that it was recited by anyone, even lower classes, almost immediately after his death to the point that a lot of its phrases integrated into our everyday speech. how almost every single italian family owns a copy of the divine comedy in their homes, and how we all still know at least the first verses of the comedy by heart. how hs kids today are still moved when they read about paolo and francesca. how he is one of the only if not the only author called by his first name, and recognizable by only his first name. how we made a special little holiday for him. how despite the sad and possibly traumatizing life he led he has been soso loved for centuries and he still will be for many to come. would he cry. i think he would cry. i really wanna hug this 700 yo dead guy

people just start dying around you at a certain point and nothing is ever the same after that