This collection explores how the human relationship with the natural world - epitomized by water, and particularly in rivers and their surroundings - has been depicted, interpreted, and symbolized in myths of Italy, especially of the Po region, from the Renaissance until the modern era.

The chapters focus on a variety of sources, objects, images, and architectural forms that serve as vehicles for mythological narratives and testimonies of cultural traditions centered around the representation of the relationship between man and nature from classical to contemporary myth. The topics covered include drawings, paintings, engravings, liturgical furnishings, as well as treatises, commentaries, literary and poetic works, building projects, maps, and movies. The Appendix features the first English translation of a late 1500s Latin poem, in which the personification of the River Po is the protagonist. The contributors uncover the multifaceted ways in which ecological sensitivity conveyed by mythology has shaped both the aesthetic and conceptual landscapes of Italian courts and cities and has informed cultural practices right up to the present day.

This text is ideal for researchers in early modern art history, renaissance art history, Italian art history, classics and the environmental humanities.

Marzia Faietti currently teaches at the School of Specialisation in Historical-Artistic Heritage at the University of Bologna and at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. She is resident of the International CIHA and former director of the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe at the Gallerie degli Uffizi. Recent publications include the exhibition catalogue Raphael 1520-1483 (2020) edited with Matteo Lafranconi, and the book Sculpture in Print, 1480-1600 (2021) edited with Anne Bloemacher and Mandy Richter.

Lorenzo Mascheretti is adjunct professor at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and lecturer at the Università di Verona, Italy. He is author of L'intarsio ligneo all'incrocio delle arti. L'opera di fra Damiano Zambelli (1480 circa-1549) (2024).