The “Mythological Monsters” App
is suitable for children aged 9 to 99 years.

The App is divided into 9 sections each telling the story of a monster from Greek mythology:

• Achéloos, the river god of the many transformations.
• Arachne, the weaver changed into a spider by the wrath of Athena.
• Chiron the centaur, the intellectual monster, half-horse and half-man.
• Cerberus, the three-headed dog guardian of the kingdom of the dead.
• Hecate, the three-bodied goddess of magic, she is a young girl, an adult and an old woman all at the same time.
• Medusa, the unhappy fate of a beautiful girl.
• The Minotaur, the birth, life and death of the son born of a queen and a bull.
• Scylla, from nymph to sea-monster because of a witch’s jealousy.
• Typhon, the explosive power of a monster who wishes to turn the world and the gods upside down.

The stories develop through the user’s active participation via numerous interactive elements. The App contains various games some of which developed in 3D environments, such as the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

The Mythological Monsters App proposes a new and original approach to the world of Greek and Roman mythology; the style of the illustrations attempts to recreate the ancient imagery without the humanist mannerism of traditional mythological illustrations and avoiding the overused stylistic elements of contemporary fantasy.

Ancient iconographic sources have been our library of images and ideas for the creation of the App’s illustrations. In the first instance, the 6th and 5th century B.C. Attic vases, and in addition ancient sculptures and other artworks. Using these examples Lucia Conversi has worked on colour and shape, returning life and visual power to images that are over 2500 years old.

The main source used in the writing of these stories was the Metamorphoses written by Publius Ovidius Naso in the first years of the 1st century A.D. Already at the time, this book presented itself as a poetic account of the Roman and Greek myths mainly for students use. In writing the texts, we also used other sources, in an attempt to propose a philologically correct version of the myths, without however being able to take into account all the myriad of variations which, by its nature, each fantastical story presents.

The sounds and music are also the result of the reconstruction and restitution of the ancient to a contemporary audience.

Little is known about ancient Greek music as very few fragments of written music have survived. It is certain that enharmonic intervals, smaller than a semitone, formed sounds similar to those of traditional Arabic and Indian music. Based on this, Paolo Vigliarolo composed the musical themes for the App using ancient or ethnic instruments such as the tambourine, the crotalum, the sistrum or the zurna, which is still used in Turkey and derives from the Greek aulos, alongside various stringed instruments.

The opening theme sets the words of the Hymn to the Sun by Mimnermus of Colophon, a 7th century B.C. lyric poet, to music.

It was essential to link the Greek myths to their settings, as a mythological story is always a geographical story: each myth has its places and each place has its myths.

The App’s interface is constituted by a planisphere, created according to ancient geographical concepts, on which the various monsters are positioned. Great care has been taken with the settings for each story, making use of reworked photographs of the places of each myth as they appear today: the beach of Scylla, the lake at Pergusa, Mount Etna, Mount Olympus, the Nile. Alternatively, we have recreated the atmosphere of the mythological places using other locations found through careful research. Overall, we have used original photographs taken specifically for this project.