The Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530), or, to use his Latin name, Actius Sincerus Sannazarus, is principally known for his great work Arcadia, a long pastoral romance in prose and verse, which had a profound influence on the development of that genre in European literature during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The never-never land that he invented lived on in later imitations by such poets as Lope de Vega, in Spain, Jorge de Montemayor, in Portugal, and Sir Philip Sidney, in England. His works in Italian belong to the period before he followed King Federico of Aragon into exile in France in 1501. On his return to Naples he devoted himself to the writing of Latin poetry, in which he believed lay the promise of his future renown. His masterpiece in this language is De Partu Virginis (On the virgin birth), published in 1526, after more than twenty years of revision. Its finished Latinity rivals that of the classical Latin poets themselves. In that same year he published his Eclogae Piscatoriae, in which the protagonists are fishermen rather than shepherds, which also inspired numerous imitations.

Salices (Willows), the first poem in the present collection, is a metamorphosis in the style of Ovid that takes place in a specific pastoral setting, the sun-baked plain of the Sarno River near Salerno. It is the hour of Pan when a band of satyrs and fauns are tuning their delicate reeds in the shade of the alder trees. Spying a group of golden-haired nymphs roaming through the grassy meadows, they invite them to dance to their merry pipings but quickly reveal their lustful intentions. The nymphs flee toward the river, where they are turned into weeping-willow trees clinging to the edge of the bank. In his description of the transformation, Sannazaro borrows from Ovid's version of the metamorphosis of Daphne into a laurel tree, but the Neo-Latin poet dwells longer on the various stages of their gradual mutation, their vital organs becoming cold little by little, ceding to the invading wood. As the editor Carmelo Salemme reminds us, willows are symbols of chastity in Mediterranean culture. He provides a very fluent and accurate translation into Italian as well as a rich commentary, noting the multiple allusions to classical poets—especially Virgil, Ovid, and Statius—together with some echoes of his fellow Neapolitan humanist poet Giovanni Pontano. He also identifies numerous errors and lapses that appear in previous translations of the poem into Italian, French, and English.

A second metamorphosis is the theme of book 2, elegy 4 of Sannazaro's Elegiae, which were not published in his lifetime. It is once more the story of a female spirit, this time a Naiad, fleeing a faun, a creature that is half-human and half-goat. In contrast to Ovid's famous story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the maid is turned into a mulberry tree that bears white berries, rather than the deep-purple berries into which Thisbe was turned as she fell upon her own sword. In his adaptation, Sannazaro introduces a scene of universal mourning at her death.

The third and last text is not a metamorphosis but an elegy composed toward the end of the poet's life. At the beginning he conjures up his early years in the town of San Cipriano Picentino, east of Salerno, where he was first inspired by the rustic Muse to compose his pastoral poetry. He then proudly recalls his years in the service of Federico, king of Naples, and the grief he suffered at the death of his patron. This leads to a sudden outburst of lamentation at his present condition, the lack of poetic inspiration and a pervasive torpor that has taken hold of him. In this expression of despair he echoes the words of Ovid in the Tristia, written in his years of exile in Pontus, on the Black Sea. He begs posterity to pardon his apparent indolence, for which he is not to blame, and implores his beloved Cassandra Marchese to attend to his funeral rites and not to despair.

It is comforting to know that the study of Renaissance Latin literature continues to flourish in Italy in such scholarly enterprises as the Biblioteca della tradizione classica.