This paper discusses three very influential contributions to contemporary Ovidian criticism: Italo Calvino’s "Ovid and Universal Contiguity" (1979) and "Six Memos for the Next Millennium" (1988), Gianpiero Rosati’s "Narciso e Pigmalione" (1983) and Nicola Gardini’s "Con Ovidio" (2017). Within the essays of these three Italian critics and authors emerges an idea of the "Metamorphoses" as a grandiose depiction of the precarious and deceptive nature of reality: an idea which is not, of course, the only interpretive option from a critical point of view, but is doubtless the best suited to the "Zeitgeist" in the «Age of Uncertainty»
