Marco Picciafuochi

by Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva

Marco Picciafuochi

June 2025 – As the old saying goes, ‘All roads lead to Rome’, so, with that spirit, we are happy to visit ‘the eternal city’ with Marco Picciafuochi in this month’s small portraits.

Marco received a BA in Philosophy (2018) from the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ (Italy) with a thesis on the theological and naturalistic fragments of Xenophanes of Colophon. He obtained his MA (2021) from the same institution in cotutelle with the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). Under the supervision of Francesco Aronadio and Johannes Hübner, Marco’s thesis analysed the conceptual system underlying Plato’s use of figurative language in the Gorgias. In 2023, he spent six months at Durham University (UK) as a visiting research student, collaborating with Phillip S. Horky. He is currently a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Rome Tre (Italy), where he continues to work with Francesco Aronadio. In his doctoral dissertation, Marco offers an original analysis of Plato’s use of imagery in the Republic, drawing upon a methodological framework borrowed from contemporary theories of conceptual metaphor.

Marco’s wider research interests include ancient Greek philosophy, with an emphasis on the Presocratics and Plato, the relationship between Plato’s literary style and his epistemological and ontological commitments, and the application of cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and lexicology to the study of ancient texts. Additionally, he is interested in the Homeric poems and their multifaceted influence on later Greek philosophical traditions. His publications include book chapters such as ‘Imaging Cognition in Plato’s Republic’ (Brill, forthcoming in 2025), ‘From the Piraeus to the Ideal City. Plato’s Reuse of Katabasis in the Writings of the Republic’ (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming), ‘Il verbo eikazô negli scritti di Platone’ (Bibliopolis 2023), etc. If you want to know more about Marco’s fascinating research, please visit his page on Academia.edu and feel free to contact him at marco.picciafuochi@outlook.com or marco.picciafuochi@uniroma3.it!