Ulysses, faced with the sight of his happy and forgetful companions on the island of the Lotophagi, reacts violently: he forcibly herds them onto the ship and compels them to resume their journey. “Let no one ever forget the past, their homeland and their native tongue!” “Reading this dazzling episode years ago filled me with such enthusiasm that I fell in love with Ulysses to the point of wanting to turn him into a musical work,” writes the composer

The summer film season has lived up to its finest traditions, from the days when people rarely went on holiday and only the wealthy had air conditioning at home. Things are looking worse from a production perspective, as the industry has so far capitalised on the summer for its longer daylight hours and mild climate

In the first half of the year, sales of the poem in Italy saw an overall increase of 25 per cent, spread across 43 different editions. The reprints by Einaudi and Ippocampo, which, as reported in Il Foglio, state: “The film has brought back into the limelight one of the seminal works of our literary culture, all too often confined to the confines of the classroom.”

In 2004, ‘Odysseus’ was released, Guccini’s take on the Odyssey. Rather than recounting the return to Ithaca, the song tells the story of a ‘peasant’ Odysseus driven out to sea by a desire for knowledge. It is a reflection on the constant tension between the desire to set out and the desire to return, on nostalgia, on restlessness and on the impossibility of finding a permanent home. “From a lyrical point of view, one of the best songs I’ve ever written,” said Guccini

The American translator savaged the film adaptation of Homer’s poem and “crashed the magazine’s website and fuelled a debate about the balance between commercial success and literary authenticity”, writes The New York Times

Elon Musk, deepfakes and the wrong questions: invoking the most advanced technology to claim an alleged authenticity of the past that never even existed in Homer’s work means failing to understand either how myths work or how history works

The American classicist dismissed the adaptation of the Odyssey as a Nolan-esque combination of grandiosity and superficiality: a work that “has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history or war” and which lacks “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth”. Response to the scathing review