Epilogue: horridus/inamoenus from a Landscape Typology to a Way of Life?

While the book in no way disavows the usefulness of the typological approach for descriptions and landscapes that is by now traditional (at least in Italy), it also pays homage to the ‘spatial’ approach, declined on the axis of cultural tradition. However, most of the contributions move in a sphere that is already decidedly that of the ‘atmosphere’, as demonstrated by the book’s subtitle, which I have not by chance chosen as the incipit of this § 5. It can indeed be said that the instance of the ‘emotive turn’, originally observable at the level of typological analysis (even if not always unequivocally), is even better substantiated if it is projected on to a horizon of ‘atmospheres’. This horizon is indeed potentially more vague for those who do not have the shield of the typological method, but it is also enormously broader. In other words, the atmosphere of anxiety that horridus/inamoenus is able to provoke, and that the modern interpreter must be able to rediscover, would be unattainable if we did not have the philological tools of ‘typology’ at our disposal, which regulate its retrieval as far as possible, even in iconographic testimonies; but it is equally true that on this basis, ‘atmospheres’ are identified in the book that transcend not only typologies, but also landscapes and even ‘spaces’, recovering suggestions of anxiety in volcanic eruptions, marshy terrain, the animal world, figures of myth and cult, and so on. This is exactly what I had in mind when I decided to allude in the title to the hypothesis of the horridus/inamoenus as a ‘Way of Life’ for the Romans: the fact that they expressed a certain existential anxiety precisely through the use of this interpretive category, both in artistic representations and in literary language.