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Spazio geografico e spazio poetico nel Petrarca latino: Europa e Italia dall'Itinerarium alle Epistole metriche
Stella, Francesco
2008
Abstract
Studies of the Latin poems of Petrarch which are not limited to philological and biographical aspects are still surprisingly rare, especially regarding texts such as the Metric epistles, which are afflicted by an unfortunate combination of unavailability of copies, philological obsessiveness and lack of serious criticism. From a brief excursus on the Epistles it becomes clear that Petrarch’s poetic space is first of all a mental space, the confluence of biographical sensitivity and historical memory, and that even when it is associated to experience, the content is dictated not by experience but by the cultural perspective, decidedly humanistic. When he writes in Latin verses, Petrarch feels he is sharing in the uninterrupted flow of writing, immersed in the vast intertext which stretches from Virgil to himself and which makes each verse into a place of textual dialogue. For this reason, the space of the Epistles is a European space only on the biographical plane, within the domain of contemporaneity. But as mythological space the space of the Epistles is mainly Italy, both as a lost homeland and as the seat of literature and the arts, especially in their historical dimension.
Series
Polymnia: Studi di filologia classica
9
Publisher
EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste
Languages
it
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