Ovid is known as the poet of love, the gods and exile: three major themes that alternate in his three creative periods, but also interpenetrate each other. Ovid's life, his "Love Elegies", "Letters to Heroines" and above all his "Ars amatoria", the "Metamorphoses" and "Lent" (festival calendar), finally the "Lamentations" and "Letters from the Black Sea" are at the centre of the presentation by the renowned Heidelberg Latinist, who in this introduction draws the sum of his decades of study of the Roman poet.