What do the stories of Narcissus consumed in self-love, Arachne spidered for her own pride, Daphne turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo's lusts, Myrrh in love with her father and Bìblide with his brother, Progne and Medea who, thirsting for revenge, become murderers of their own children, have to tell the man of the twenty-first century? Why should he care about "two universal floods, about thirty rapes and almost as many missed rapes, more than one case of transsexuality, three incest and two attempted incest, about sixteen rivers in love, four islands and eight dogs beginning with the letter 'L'... to say nothing of the hundreds of alberifications, uccellifications, petrifications, stellifications that buffer, match, contaminate, mingle, pollute without shame" in Ovid's Metamorphoses? To answer himself, the man of the twenty-first century will do well to widen his eyes on this book and overlook an incredible flurry of mutations, "marked by deviations of timbre, arrhythmias, modulations, traced at times by a deadly irony, on the verge at times of gossip; where, however, at every step the crevasse of tragedy may open wide."