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well as its attachment, during the Roman period, to the “world’s navel.” 4 Originally associated with Dionysus and his extravagances, the famous mountain with its two peaks will be shared for a time by the complementary couple, Dionysus and Apollo (see Pausanias X, 4, 3). In Rome, particularly after the battle of Actium (in 31 BCE), Mount Parnassus became one of the symbols of Apollo, and a symbol of victory made possible by his intervention (see Pliny, H. N., XV, chap. 29, 133-135). It is, however, the confusion created by the Roman poet Statius that will lay the basis for its subsequent true valorization. The Latin author mixes elements related to Mount Parnassus with features of Helicon, the other sacred mountain of Apollo much lower and gentler, identified by Hesiod as the mountain of the Muses. By transposing the Muses and Pegasus as well as the famous Hippocrene spring on Parnassus, Statius and his successors established the concept of an exemplary mountain, synonymous with inspiration and eternal glory. Confusion between the two mountains is present in the commentary on the Aeneid by Servius (commentary to Aen. VII, 641), a text that will leave its mark well beyond the Middle Ages. Henceforth, and for more than a millennium, Parnassus was the sacred and poetic mountain. Having lost its wild connotation, it appears as a kind of earthly paradise, endowed with a spring and magical qualities. Antiquity has become familiar with the image of the poetic encounter on the Parnassus, which is essential in the context of its rediscovery during the Renaissance. Thus, Lucretius says that the Roman poet Ennius met Homer in a dream at the Parnassus, who initiated him to the “secrets of being” and reincarnated himself as the Latin poet.5

The subsequent amplification of Parnassus occurred paradoxically at a time when the difference between the mountain and the Helicon became once again evident. It had been Boccaccio in his Genealogia deorum gentilium who set things straight based on geographical arguments. Both Dante and Petrarch related to Parnassus: the former at the invocation of Apollo in Paradise (Par I, 13-46), the latter in the context of his coronation speech of 1341, which symbolically begins with a quotation from Virgil: sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis ruptat amor (“But a sweet love takes me along the deserted slopes of Parnassus,” Georg. II, vv. 289-293). For the author of the Canzoniere, the Parnassus becomes the heavenly scene for a prospective imagination that allows dialogue between the masters of Antiquity and those of the modern era. His coronation speech held in Rome started with the idea of an abandoned and ruined Parnassus,