Federico Fellini's last film, Fellini Satyricon, was based on one of the most famous works created during the reign of Nero, Satyricon by Petronius (first century B.C.), and derives its self-conscious dialectical tension from the ancient textual source and its modern adaptation for the screen.

The film director considered antiquity an unknown factor, and the only loyal way to refer to it was not historically, by its very nature a misleading and misrepresentative approach, but 'onirically'. Fellini's cinematic reconstruction, however, was not produced simply by adding elements of fantasy, but by consciously 'restoring' the fragmentary text of the ancient novel.

This occured via the addition of new characters and new locations, that transcend the simple role of backdrop by becoming themselves protagonists. In Fellini's Satyricon the opposite of what is usually called "adaptation" – normally indistinguishable from cinematic "reduction" – happens.

Fellini makes up for the lacunae in the ancient sources by a thorough reading of the essay Daily Life in Rome by Jerome Carcopino. A comparison between the original screenplay and the book proves it to be a significant source of insipiration, almost as significant as Petronius' novel.

In Fellini's film, the neutrality of Petronius, who makes no moral judgement on his characters, is replaced by an aesthetic – and not an ethical – opposition, rendered as light versus obscurity in the film, thus restoring the contrast between virtue and moral decline in Nero's Rome, a contrast drawn from Carcopino's text.

In 1960 Vittorio Gassman assigned the task of translating Aeschylus' Oresteia to Pier Paolo Pasolini, and planned to stage it at the Greek theatre in Syracuse. Gassman had planned to break with the classical tradition and stage the ancient tragedy in a totally modern way.

Commissioning the translation of the Oresteia to a poet who was well-known but also controversial, and who was also a non-classicist scholar, unleashed press campaigns and storms of abuse from academic world, that reacted angrily against Pasolini and his inroads into the disciplinary arena of Philological Science.
This essay-documentary examines an important event in the history of Italian culture via letters, theatre chronicles, newspapers, films, TV interviews of the time and unpublished material from the Archive of the Museum and the Centro Studi INDA in Syracuse.

Abstracts from presentations and reports made during the fifth annual "Luminar. Internet and Humanism" conference.

Bellini and the East, London, National Gallery 12 april-25 june 2006 (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 14 dicember 2005-26 march 2006); catalogue ed. by Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, National Gallery Company Limited, London 2005