NEWS RELEASE

Contact: David West (west@nsula.edu )
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466

5/20/2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NATCHITOCHES ­ Dr. Jean D'Amato, professor of classics in the Louisiana Scholars' College at Northwestern State University, recently made two presentations on some of her recent research.

D'Amato participated in a session on 14th-Century Italian Humanism with a talk, "The Ancient Deliciae of the Phlegraean Fields and Their Lesser-Known Proto-Humanist 'Escavators''' at the 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies, in Kalamazoo, Mich. The gathering is the largest medieval conference in the world with presentations by a number of international scholars.

In the presentation, D'Amato focused upon figures from the 14th century who lived about the same time as Boccaccio and Petrarch and apparently had influence on these luminaries, but are little known. She noted the works of Paulinus of Venice, the Bishop of Pozzuoli which is in the Phlegraean Fields, who wrote for King Robert the Wise, the Angevin monarch who ruled Southern Italy from Naples and the tract of an anonymous compiler whose work built upon that of Paulinus. This tract, in turn, initiated the entire tradition describing the antiquities of the zone.

D'Amato was also a guest scholar for a monthly seminar of a liberal arts research group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She gave the group an overview of her work regarding the development of balneological and antiquarian traditions in the Phlegraean Fields, the subject of the book that she hopes to complete this summer. This also included an overview of the Website, Campania Felix, which is in the process of development. The Website is a joint effort with a classicist from the U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Richard Monti, who had invited D'Amato to speak at the research seminar.

Included within this presentation was an examination of one late Renaissance tourist/scholar to the region, a Slovene named Augustus Tyfernus, who published an edition of the most important guide to the area, adding new material that reflected the advances of archeology and science as these were applied to the region. In this discussion, D'Amato highlighted a volcanic cave, presumably the site of Purgatory, where animals, especially dogs, were dragged in, seemed to die, then thrown into an adjacent lake where they would 'revive,' symbolizing the idea of death, purgation, resurrection. The cave is appropriately named the Grotta dei Cani (Grotto of the Dogs).

D'Amato gave a sense of the popularity of this site by quoting the the words of Thomas Grey (rather appropriately) writing to Richard West, "We sailed in the Bay of Baia, sweated in the Solfatara, and died in the Grotta del Cane, as all strangers do."

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