the truth about the goddess of love and beauty

VENICE – Teacher, writer, journalist, highly followed blogger, her Facebook page “Galatea Vaglio Pillole di storia” now has 90,000 followers: she is Mariangela Galatea Vaglio, graduated in Classics at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and doctor in Ancient History at the Sapienza University of Rome. Her books, her articles, the videos on various social platforms, the podcasts, are proof that history is not something to be relegated to the classroom. There are many books by her, in which she has given life to more or less well-known historical figures: Dido, Socrates, Theodora, Caesar, Antony, now here comes “Aphrodite. The truth of the goddess”, (Giunti), where he focuses on a female divinity: Aphrodite for the Greeks, Venus for the Romans, goddess of beauty, love, generation. «In fact – says the author – this book tries to talk about Aphrodite in a slightly different way than usual, because the impression one often has of her is that of a goddess who deals with passion, love and beauty. Therefore in the collective imagination she has a superficial appearance, while in reality she is a goddess who even philosophers like Plato recognized as the force that held the universe together and which in some way gives rise to the universe itself.

PUGNACE GODDESS

Goddess with a complicated and dramatic “personal” history: the other gods often try to take away her power, but she becomes the most important goddess of Mesopotamia. In the legends she even suffers violence and decides to take revenge both against the man who perpetrated it and against the other gods, taking absolute power for herself. She is also the first to visit the realm of the dead. Goddess who rejects traditional marriage, who has a toyboy much younger than her, Adonis, who has temporary and fixed-term lovers, none ever like her. She has a very independent character, which her other gods, very patriarchal, struggle to accept and try to pigeonhole her into roles that she always refuses: her mission is to become the founder of a great civilization through the mortal son of she Aeneas. «She also had to deal with very modern problems. She is a single mother, who must preserve her identity, but also protect her son, inserted in a patriarchal society that does not recognize her freedom of choice, a woman with a very strong character who pays very high prices for her ability and desire to rebel to the “rules”. Now Mariangela Galatea Vaglio tells the true story of Aphrodite, giving her a broader and perhaps more truthful and “dignified” dimension than today’s culture does with this heroine of other times, super feminine, a woman endowed with extreme charm as well as strength and power.

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