Untold Italy · Friday, August 28, 2026
Professor Monique Skidmore joins Katie Clark on the Untold Italy podcast to discuss how locations from Homer's epic poem, 'The Odyssey,' can be found in modern-day Italy. The discussion highlights the historical context of Magna Grecia and how oral traditions may have influenced the poem's settings.
“But I was watching I kept thinking, wait, many of these places are initially So with the help of an expert anthropologist, we're going to explore those locations and discover what Odysseus was doing. And now what is modern day Italy?”
“But places like the Islands of the Sirens, Aeolia and CS's Realm are actually in modern day Italy. Of course, back when the poem was written, southern Italy was known as Magna Grecia and was a series of Greek colonies, and evidence still exists of these settlements today all over Sicily and at the temples of Peston south of the Amalfi Coast.”
“The Odyssey is set in the thirteenth to the twelfth century BC, so a really really long time, but it wasn't composed till the eighth century BC, and between the eighth century BC and the third century BC, so for a period of five hundred years, there was this area of southern Italy called Magna Grecia, so this was great to Greece. It was where a whole bunch of Greeks came and colonized for five hundred years, so about the time that Homer was creating the Odyssey, composing the Odyssey, Magna Greece was being created.”