{"id":92,"date":"2011-02-07T21:37:15","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T21:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=92"},"modified":"2016-03-30T12:00:45","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T12:00:45","slug":"felice-vinci-omero-nel-baltico-le-origini-nordiche-dellodissea-e-delliliade-5th-edition-rome-palombi-editori-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/06-1\/reviews61\/felice-vinci-omero-nel-baltico-le-origini-nordiche-dellodissea-e-delliliade-5th-edition-rome-palombi-editori-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Felice Vinci, Omero nel Baltico. Le origini nordiche dell\u2019Odissea e dell\u2019Iliade (5th edition; Rome: Palombi Editori, 2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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The book tells, and documents, the author\u2019s journey following his original intuition: can the geography described by Homer in his epics be related not to the Mediterranean coasts and towns, but to the Scandinavian ones? Vinci pursued such an \u2018experiment\u2019: he tried to fit Homer\u2019s places into the Scandinavian context. And according to Vinci\u2019s studies, partially supported by further studies by Nilsson and Tilak, the protagonists of the Iliad<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em> could have actually lived and performed their heroic deeds on the coasts of the Baltic Sea. One of the starting and strongest points of Vinci\u2019s research is already suggested in the ancient historical sources: Plutarch stated that Ogygia island, where Calypso kept Ulysses for several years, was in the Northern Atlantic, five days of navigation away from Britannia. Then, the evidences mingle with an unstoppable sequence of facts and hypotheses, reasonings and dreams. For example, why is it said that the island of Faro, in front of Egyptian Alexandria, took one day of navigation from Egypt?<\/p>\n

As Vinci bears witness to with his studies, the names of Homeric places still overlap with the names of Northern villages and cities. The same applies to the distance between towns, the description of the warriors\u2019 garments and habits, as further substantiated by well-documented archaeological and historical studies that match Vinci\u2019s peculiar theory. Furthermore, there is an answer to the issue of the climate described in Homer\u2019s poems: the Baltic Sea was warmer at that time, just before the end of the \u2018climatic optimum\u2019 that forced Nordic populations to move to warmer places, i.e. to the Mediterranean area.<\/p>\n

As the cooling of the climate is concerned, I must confess that I felt myself shivering: what an intellectual vertigo does induce Vinci\u2019s notion, whereby Europe\u2019s classical culture shifts suddenly northward. Torn between my Mediterranean birth and my sympathy for Nordic countries, having visited Greece and the \u2018epic\u2019 places of Achilles and Telemachus, I still find it difficult to accept the idea that Ithaca may be one of the Danish islands, Troy to be in the Gulf of Finland, Crete in Pomerania, and Mycenae, perhaps, the ancestral cradle of today\u2019s Copenhagen. Not to mention Ulysses–thus interpreting Tacitus\u2019 definition–being a forerunner of the Vikings, maybe even the Ull recalled in the Edda<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yet, as the classical scholar Rosa Calzecchi Onesti states in the foreword to Vinci\u2019s book, none of the great previous researches on Homer\u2019s geography is in doubt, because Vinci argues that such Northern populations recreated a second \u2018Baltic\u2019 along the Greek coasts and islands. As historical novelist Franco Cuomo writes in the preface, Vinci\u2019s book must be \u201cread like the memory of a population who, moving elsewhere, brings along its own myths\u201d (p. 9) . Vinci’s book evokes Homer\u2019s epics as a primordial portrait of a \u2018greekness\u2019 that we have learned to know and imagine through classical texts, visual arts, movies, travels, etc. We know that history is crowded of misunderstandings and misinterpretations, and Vinci\u2019s theory shall be seriously considered as a new approach to Homeric and classical studies.<\/p>\n

The book suffers from the poor quality of the pictures contained therein. Also, I cannot comment on the conclusiveness of Vinci\u2019s revolutionary thesis. Still, I can appreciate its originality, the personal approach of Vinci when he recalls his journeys throughout Scandinavia, the careful descriptions of the landscapes he visited and their comparison with well-known Homeric places, and the wealth of historical sources cited to support his stance.<\/p>\n

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\"Vinci<\/p>\n

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I heard about Felice Vinci\u2019s book for the first time in 2001. At that time I was starting my scholarly researches in Finnish art and I found it most intriguing to be introduced to the unconventional theories on classical mythology of a professional engineer, who proposed as of the 1990s a new approach to Homer\u2019s epics. According to Vinci, the origins of the Iliad<\/em> and the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em> are to be retrieved in the Northern European countries, and specifically on the Baltic coasts. I must confess that I was sceptical at the beginning. Then, I read his book and began to appreciate the quality of his arguments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[111,113,114,264,153,117],"coauthors":[1212],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews61","tag-baltic","tag-homer","tag-iliad","tag-mythology","tag-nordic","tag-odyssey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}