Strade di 'charta': viaggi della poesia dall’antichità al medioevo

The article proposes an investigation into the associations between the personified book and the road it travels to reach its recipients, both in Classical Antiquity, when the papyrus scroll was naturally associated with the image of a road (see Hor. sat. 1,5), and in the Late Antique and Medieval poetry, in which the transition from volumen to codex required the adoption of other, more suitable scribal metaphors, such as that of the white field to be ploughed. This latter, which had already originated in the context of writing on wax tablets, experienced new vitality in Medieval Poetry, especially in the genre of riddles and in the apostrophe to the travelling charta of Carolingian poetry.