Between real and represented places

My love for visual arts and sculpture has driven me to study the history of art at university. The vivid color and thematic variety of ancient Roman wall paintings fascinated me at first sight. I was especially intrigued by the garden paintings, or panoramas of garden scenes with trees, flowers, and birds covering sometimes the entire room, such as the garden frescoes from the Villa of Livia (now displayed in the National Museum of Rome). After completing my Master’s dissertation on Pompeian garden paintings, I wanted to know more about actual Roman gardens—particularly what the Romans saw behind those painted gardens. At that time, I had the opportunity to start my doctorate in Pisa, a Tuscan city famous for her leaning tower. During my four years of study in Pisa, I attended lectures on archaeology, epigraphy, history, and textual study—a precious experience that widened my perspective, which had previously been focused on art history. In my doctoral dissertation, I examined the Horti Sallustiani—a refined residence constructed by the Roman historian Sallust on the outskirts of Rome, usually translated as “gardens of Sallust,” although they are not exactly “gardens” in the modern sense—aiming at reconstructing the diachronic transitions of its space and ornamentation. Currently, I am interested in the relations between image and place, i.e., the spatial settings of artworks as well as their transfer from one place to another, as well as visual representations of places in media such as paintings, mosaics, and sculptures.