Percorsi topografici intorno a un topos epico: gli inferi ovidiani

The description of Juno’s journey to the Underworld found in the fourth book of Metamorphoses represents one of Ovid’s most challenging reworkings of Vergil’s Aeneid. However, through the density of Vergilian allusions and rhetorical devices, which most scholars tend to focus on, we can still glimpse a visual and almost topographical reinterpretation of this topos by Ovid. From a rhetorical place the Underworld becomes a real place and this passage encompasses some new features in epic technique as well as ideological implications.