Love and Metamorphoses

A few kilometers away from Rome, the sand dunes of Sabaudia, the Circeo marshes and Arpino’s mountain waterfalls become the backdrops to fabulous transformations: Callisto is changed into a bear, Jupiter metamorphoses into Diane, Glaucus becomes a sea monster and the nymph Salamachis melds into the body of the young Hermaphrodite. But each of these transformations also plays on those of their performers, thus giving a new twist to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written before and during his exile from the Roman Empire, and questioning the role of gender and identity in our society.