ACADEMIA Letters Itinerarium Barbaricum. The Latin Narratives about the Other Carlo Arrighi, Università degli Studi di Padova Rather than a traditional article, the following pages have been conceived as a sort of itinerar- ium. As in the case of itineraria, the stages marked here are those of a road already walked in the past and, at the same time, they provide a guide for those who wish to journey this same road. This contribution aims to present the relationship between Roman identity and barbar- ian otherness, with particular attention to the aesthetic standards used to represent barbarians in Latin narratives from the frst to the sixth century A.D. Indeed, barbarians are often rep- resented by ancient authors as beastly creatures, displaying aesthetic features far diferent from those with whom they came into contact (as they probably were). Too rarely, however, their supposed peculiarities are shown. Several diferent populations were subsumed under the label “barbarian,” made homogeneous by their shared diversity, both linguistic (hence the origin of the term ‘barbarian’) and physical (for example, their skin colour), and their ferocity. Nothing could be more demeaning for an event than to be classifed as barbaric, and nothing is easier to represent. The Greek world triggered this idea, and the Roman world gathered evi- dence and propagated it with its geographical and cultural conquests. Hence, since the Roman world encouraged the process, it is useful to examine narratives provided by Latin authors and to provide an overview of these barbarians who, a mix of reality and imagination, continually shift from one era to another, from the political sphere to the quotidien, endlessly creating a representation of what can be defned as a recurring “cultural paradigm.” 1 1 With regard to the reconstruction of the ancient social classifcation in contemporary collective memory, see P. von Rummel, “The Fading Power of Images: Romans, Barbarians, and the Uses of a Dichotomy in Early Medieval Archaeology,” in Post Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, eds. W. Pohl and G. Heydemann(Turnhout, 2013), 365–406. Academia Letters, June 2021 Corresponding Author: Carlo Arrighi, carlo.arrighi@phd.unipd.it Citation: Arrighi, C. (2021). Itinerarium Barbaricum. The Latin Narratives about the Other. Academia Letters, Article 1078. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1078. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0