Apart from two anecdotes recounted in Rerum memorandarum libri, a cursory homage paid to Dante as a love poet in sonnet 287 of his Canzoniere, an equally brief allusion to Dante in a few lines of the Triumphus Cupidinis, and a polemical note in a Pomponius Mela codex where he contradicts a geographical detail contained in the Commedia, Petrarch’s attention towards his authoritative predecessor seems marginal. Nonetheless, in 1359 he wrote a letter (Familiares, XXI 15) to Boccaccio (who had given Petrarch a copy of the Commedia in 1351, the current Codex Vaticano Latino 3199, which contains a very short and unclear annotation by Petrarch) devoted exclusively to Dante. This letter was aptly described by Foscolo as “lengthened out by contradictions, ambiguities, and indirect apologies”[1]. In his letter, Petrarch mentions neither Dante nor the Commedia by name. At the same time, however, he takes pains to defend himself against the accusation, clearly widespread among his contemporaries, of envy and hatred for his predecessor, whom he recalls meeting once as a child. Although Petrarch recognizes Dante’s primacy in vernacular poetry, he declares that he has never read the Commedia, and forcefully asserts the specific attributes of his own intellectual profile devoted to the superior Latin narrative prose and poetry. This position is reiterated in the Senile XV 2, in which, acknowledging Dante’s primacy in vernacular eloquence, Petrarch reaffirms the superiority of the stilus… latinu. Despite this display of self-importance, Petrarch’s early familiarity with Dante’s work is attested by reminiscences and textual echoes that permeate not only the Trionfi, where this might be expected, but also his Canzoniere and even his Latin works. Nonetheless, however significant such formal coincidences may be, they do not negate another apt comment by Foscolo, recalled recently[2], indicating that the personalities of Dante and Petrarch were irreducibly different: “each was unique and different from the other in all matters”[3].

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[1] U. Foscolo, A parallel between Dante and Petrarch, in Id., Opere, a cura di F. Gavazzeni, Torino, Einaudi-Gallimard, 1995, vol. II pp. 634-35: “lengthened out by contradictions, ambiguities, and indirect apologies”.

[2] M. Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e Dante, in “Rivista di studi danteschi”, a. IV 2004, pp. 184-204.

[3] U. Foscolo, Discorso sul testo della ‘Divina Commedia’, in Id., Studi su Dante, a cura di G. Da Pozzo, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1979, vol. I p. 294.

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