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The onomastic source of Silvia and Nerina, two young women who died young but live on in two of Leopardi's Canti, has been unanimously identified by scholars in Torquato Tasso's Aminta. Without denying this hypothesis, my paper examines the rich tradition that the two names boast in classical and humanistic poetry both in Latin and in the vernacular, especially in the pastoral genre. However, I suggest that, along with literary texts, Leopardi consulted ornithological treatises and derived from them a number of onomastic suggestions, as well as several features that the two women - like the poet as he portrays himself in Il passero solitario - share with the birds to whom he dedicated a warm Elogio in the Operette morali and many notes in the Zibaldone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats of the story of Pygmalion's love for his statue from Ovid's version, one of the best-known myths of the classical antiquity. In Metamorphoses X, 243-297, Ovid makes a brilliant reflection about the artistic and literary creativity. Pygmalion, a devotee sculptor of Venus, despises the women and he falls in love with the statue that he made, representing an idealized female image. He is the artifex par excellence: the sculptor, refusing the reality, prefers to realize one analogous and shapes the ivory with admirable and extraordinary art that can reach the aesthetical perfection. The Pygmalion's art overcomes the reality about beauty and changes, in such way, the very idea of ancient art: the myth becomes allegory of the ability of the art sublimation and, to the meantime, with subtle self-referential implication inside Ovidian verse, of the literary poetic creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]