Two voices on the Black Sea: Luca Desiato to the (re)discovery of Ovid’s exile

Abstract

The elegies of Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto still represent an essential reference for those who want to investigate the experience of exile in all its aspects and complexity. Not surprisingly, several contemporary authors have looked at the tomitan poetry of the last Ovid as a real paradigm for the writings from and on the exile of all times. In the forty-four chapters in which he articulates the novel On the shores of the Black Sea (1992), Luca Desiato “breaks down” the human soul touched by the fate of the exile, an exile that presents itself as an interior condemnation. The protagonist, a writer who lives the last course of his existence in the bourgeois Rome of the Nineties, alternates his voice with that of the Roman poet, condemned by Augustus in 8 A.D. to the relegatio perpetua. Saverio represents, first of all, an exile of existence, a prisoner of the last time he’s living, an extreme time, like the lands facing the Pontus Euxinus.