Inherited from the Antiquity, the topic of love formerly develops in European culture as an anthitetic exchange between the poison and the remedy of love. The most interesting element of this conflict lies in the relation between these two themes in the symbolic and mythological traditions.
We just need to think of Achilles' lance, which can either poison its victim or set it free from love illness reminds us of Eros, who made people fall in love by the means of golden arrows and set them free from by the means of lead arrows. We can add to all this the tradition of the magical fountains, whose waters once drunk can make people who drink their water love or hate. This tradition continues through the Orlando Furioso at least until the XVIII century in Voltaire's Pucelle d'Orléans.
In this articulate antithesis the debate between sacred and profane love is set; the origins of this debate are to be found in the contrast between the philosophical traditions of Plato and Lucretius, an ideological contrast where the former oversteps the latter though Lucretian tradition keeps on revealing its repressed presence through the centuries.
All this makes the attention brought to the passage between the perceptions of the Humanism and the Counter-Reformation really pertaining. At the same time we must not forget that the symbolism sprung from the subject of Eros pharmakon matches with some archetypes of the human mind as well as some basic rhetorical forms like the oxymoron, whose fortune during the Baroque period is widely known.
Again, the epistemological meaning of love remedy could reach also some very interesting imbrications in the alchemical and paralchemical vision like Paracelsus' one.
Be it as it may it is evident that the topic chosen for the Symposium of Cesenatico (May 2006) urges to a transversal attitude capable of taking into account different fields of knowledge, at the same time pushing historical and anthropological disciplines to confront on a common field, as it is clearly showed by the variety of the interventions presented. Most of the papers refer to different aspects of a literary European tradition that seems astonishingly compact and uninterrupted in treating question of love. Anyway the incursions into other domains are frequent, testifying the richness and vitality of this topic throughout the centuries.
