Close Encounters? Giovanni Pascoli's Crepereia Tryphaena (1893): Accessing Roman Childhood Through the Lens of a Romantic Neo-Latin Poem

This article introduces the readers to Crepereia Tryphaena, a poem by Giovanni Pascoli from 1893, written in Sapphic strophes. The archaeological discovery of a second-century sarcophagus of a young woman who was buried along with her wedding gifts forms the starting point for this poem. At the same time, Pascoli approaches the topic as a poeta senza storia: to him, childhood and youth are eternal and fundamental categories of human existence, not bound by limits of space and time. The introduction to and literary analysis of the poem is followed by a reflection on the relation between fiction and 'historical truth'.