His meeting with Petrarch

During the years of his Neapolitan upbringing Boccaccio came into contact with intellectuals who were friends with Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, as he is better known in English. By frequenting Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, Barbato da Sulmona, Giovanni Barrili and, probably, Sennuccio del Bene, he experienced a first contact with Petrarch’s poetry and began to nurture admiration for the man of letters from Rieti. A tangible example of Boccaccio’s esteem is the epistle Mavortis milex, addressed to Petrarch, whom he had not yet met, and yet already identified as a point of reference for his own work, as a model capable of transforming his “ingestam molem et ignorantiam copiosam [...] in tenuitatem mirabilem”, Ep.: II, 12[1]. Celebrative tones are detectable in the biography De vita et moribus domini Francischi Petracchi, the date of which is unknown but that was certainly written before 1350 and, therefore, before the first time he met Petrarch. The work enthusiastically recalls the Roman poetic coronation and it further exalts, on a highly biographical note, Petrarch’s refusal to study law, as his father would have wanted, so as to be able to dedicate himself to writing.

It was in Florence in 1350 that Boccaccio first met Petrarch, who was on his way to Rome for the Jubilee. The following year he went to Padua as official messenger to offer Petrarch a professorship at the Studio in Florence. Boccaccio disapproved of Petrarch’s move to Milan to enter the service of Giovanni Visconti, a political adversary of Florence, and their friendship cooled for a period. Yet, already in 1359 Giovanni’s visit to Milan shows how the friendship had been rekindled. In 1363 and 1367 Boccaccio visited Petrarch in Venice. Their last meeting took place in Padua the following year. The uninterrupted correspondence and the continuous swapping of books are the most tangible testimony to the prolific intellectual exchange between these two men of letters.

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[1]Epistole e lettere, ed. G. Auzzas, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. Ed. V. Branca, vol. 5.1, Milan 1992, p. 514.