"Campania ridens". Proposte per una geografia "epistolare"

The article aims to investigate the Campanian environment in Cicero’s Letters. It is an environment that is not present in landscape descriptions in the traditional sense, but which is configured first of all as a real geographical “alter-ego” of Rome (a pusilla Roma, as Cicero calls the environment of his villa in Cuma) that reproduces the same social and cultural dynamics of the urbs. The environment of Campania emerges firstly from digressions on “landscape entities” with a strong ideological and political value (this is the case of Baia, a real trial subject in relation to Clodius, or an ambiguous place, linked in a double thread to Caesar and the Caesarians). Secondly, I investigate the possibility that for Cicero there was a real Campanian “spirit”, identifiable in the epistles to Campanian addressees. In particular, the personalities of Marcus Marius and Papirius Paetus are analysed, characterised by common traits such as Epicureanism and a humour that, especially in the case of Paetus, goes back to the Roman facetious spirit of the past.