Metamorfosi romane. Modi plastici di trasformazione dei corpi multispecie dell’Urbe

Abstract

The myth of metamorphosis has nourished the collective imagination of Western culture, open-ing up a plastic and fluid dissolution of the boundaries between the natural and human world. In the moving body, the narrative enchantment of these transformations emerges, where forms and modes overlap, revealing freedom and temporality. Rome, long suspended between the urban and the natural, today presents itself — in an era marked by climate change — as an emblematic case. From a crystallized pictorial subject, the city now reveals itself as a metamorphic, multispecies body, both fragile and resistant. Roman metamorphoses restore aesthetic value to the dynamism and temporality of bodies, dissolving the boundaries between nature and artifice, form and mode. These bodies are not resources or ecological tools, but plastic agents: generators of behaviours, rela-tionships, and bodily resonances.