Attraversare l’ignoto. Lo sguardo sul paesaggio nel viaggio romano, dall’Eneide al De reditu suo

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Virgil’s Aeneid and Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo, adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that combines philological analysis with anthropological and geocritical perspectives. The study focuses on the role of landscape as both a narrative and symbolic device in the representation of mobility, and on the gaze that acts upon it. In Virgil’s epic, the various lands explored become narrative agents, functioning as perceptual and symbolic horizons that contribute to Rome’s political and cultural project, serving as projections of a future ideal. For Rutilius, the journey – elegiac and disenchanted in tone – offers a perspective on familiar and well-known places, marked by loss and fragmentation. Both texts depict subjects in transit, suspended between a fractured origin and an uncertain destination. The interstitial dimension thus emerges as a space of identity transformation. From a broader perspective, the comparison between the two poems invites reflection on the meaning of travel and displacement, offering interpretive categories that may also prove useful in examining contemporary migratory dynamics.