Below are the members collaborating on the FALSVM project, presented according to their respective academic units
University of Trento
Unit focus: Appendix Vergiliana and Appendix Ouidiana
Elena Castelnuovo
Research Fellow
University of Trento
Bio
Elena Castelnuovo is a Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities at the University of Trento, where she is currently working on pseudo-Ovidian texts as part of the project “FALSVM – Forging Authorship in Literature, Scholarship, and Visual Media”. Her research interests focus on late Latin poetry and its interactions with history, liturgy, and the visual arts, as well as questions of authenticity and forgery in the Latin literary tradition. She has published on the reception of Horace in late Latin literature, as well as on Claudian, Prudentius, Dracontius, and Venantius Fortunatus. She has forthcoming contributions on the pseudo-Ovidian elegies Nux and Somnium.
University of Pavia
Unit focus: Appendix Tibulliana
Maria Jennifer Falcone
Vice-PI and Head of Unit
University of Pavia
Bio
Maria Jennifer Falcone is an Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Pavia, in the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, where she also teaches the history of the tradition and reception of classical works. Until 2026, she holds a Humboldt Fellowship at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, where she is conducting a research project on the Ilias Latina. Her primary areas of scholarly interest include Roman tragedy of the Republican period, the Ilias Latina, Late Antiquity literature, and prison literature.
Elena Merli
Aggregate member
University of Milan
Bio
Elena Merli is an Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Milan, in the Department of Humanities, Membre associé of the international Réseau Poésie Augustéenne and of EuGeStA (European Gender Studies). She is also Auswaertige Mitleserin of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Bayerische Akademie der
Wissenschaften). Her research interests focus on Ovid, Martial, the Flavian literature, Pliny the Younger, and classical reception.
Elisa Romano
Internal member
University of Pavia
Bio
Elisa Romano is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Pavia. She is member of the Scientific Committee of the “Fondazione Alma Mater Ticinensis” and of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere in Milan. She is also part of the editorial board of several academic journals, including “Athenaeum” and “Studi italiani di Filologia classica”.
Her main interests focus on the history of Roman culture in the middle and late Republican periods, with particular attention to Lucretius, Cicero, and Varro, as well as on Latin scientific and technical literature, with a special focus on architecture and medicine. Among her major contributions are the volumes La capanna e il tempio. Vitruvio o dell’architettura e Medici e filosofi. Letteratura medica e società altoimperiale (The Hut and the Temple: Vitruvius or On Architecture and Doctors and Philosophers: Medical Literature and High Imperial Society), the commentary on Horace’s Odes and Epodes, and the annotated edition of Books I and VII–X of Vitruvius’ De Architectura.
Matilde Oliva
Research Fellow
University of Pavia
Bio
Matilde Oliva studied at the University of Pavia, where she earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, and where she was a student at the Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS). She later obtained her PhD from the University of Pisa (Dottorato regionale “Pegaso” – Firenze, Pisa, Siena) with a dissertation on Cicero’s Partitiones oratoriae (currently in publication). Matilde Oliva has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Classical Philology and adjunct lecturer of Latin Language at the University of Florence. Her research interests focus on Latin prose, particularly late Republican rhetoric and oratory, as well as on Cicero’s rhetoric and philosophy.
Sapienza University of Rome
Unit focus: Rhetoric and Oratory
Luigi Silvano
Aggregate member
University of Turin
Bio
Luigi Silvano is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Turin, where he also teaches courses in Byzantine Philology and Renaissance Humanism. His research interests are focused both on the field of Classics and their reception in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and on Byzantine literature and civilization. He is author, among other, of the monograph Classici veri e falsi alla scuola degli umanisti (2019) and co-editor-in chief of the journal Medioevo greco.
University of Udine
Unit focus: Ancient Grammarians
