Ovidio - Sulmona, Italy - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

The larger than life bronze statue of Ovid, the work of Ettore Ferrari stands on a marble pedestal in Piazza XX Settembre. Inaugurated in 1925 in the presence of the king, it pays homage to the famous Roman poet who was born in the same city. This remarkable statue illustrates the importance of Ovid as a literary figure, especially for his masterpiece The Metamorphoses.

On the base are engraved two famous excerpts from his collection of poems, Tristia: "Sulmo mihi patria est" and "Pelignae dicar gloria gentis ego" or "Sulmona is my homeland" and "I will be called the glory of the Peligna people".

Publius Ovidius Naso (March 20, 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly organized province of Moesia on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to "a poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to divulge details has given rise to much speculation among scholars.

Ovid is best known for his Metamorphoses, a continuous mythological narrative in fifteen books written in dactylic hexameters. He is also known for his works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") and Fasti. Tristia gives a long autobiographical account of his life. His poetry was widely imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.

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