Of course he was a poet who threw away poetry to jump to another place, closer, to more modern territories. And of course he was a remarkable man, prepared to reach the position of notary or lawyer or curial figure, fates from which he knew how to escape. Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) crossed the 14th century with the mission of creating a new way of writing, of thinking, of diagnosing his time and of interpreting tradition. Petrarch, to put it bluntly, marked a new era in the West (along with Dante and Boccacio). That West of opulence, of contradiction, of disaster, of the first mercantile capitalism, of holy wars between powerful families and very ambitious Popes.
In the midst of this burning landscape, Petrarch (son of a Florentine notary) is far from being the placid and dreamy poet, afflicted and suffering, that the laziness of some biographies brought about. No way. Petrarch is a rigorous thinker who describes the state of desolation of a world where he sees the stigma of human evil as an emblem of decadence. But getting to the bottom of the Petrarchan legacy requires investing time; delving into the ocean of his prose work takes a lifetime. Written in Latin, his legacy includes thousands of letters. . . . The same ones that the publishing house Acantilado, in a Herculean gamble, publishes in four volumes -4,285 pages- coordinated by the late Ugo Dotti, translated by Francisco Socas and with review by Jordi Bayod.
The set is divided between family lettersnot necessarily to the family, but also to friends, acquaintances, contemporaries such as Bocaccio, Cardinal Colonna, even classics with whom he maintained a fictitious correspondence: Cicero, Virgil, the historian Titus Livy, Horace, Seneca…; then there are the Letters of senescence, where he displays his wisdom and anticipatory intelligence; the Nameless letters, many also like another game of mirrors with their teachers, whom they turn into interlocutors of their concerns, their uncertainties, their contradiction; and the scattered cards.
Petrarch’s success was early. As an attentive citizen and as a poet. Throughout his existence he published a set of poems entitled Triumphs, and also 317 sonnets, 29 songs, 9 sestinas, 7 ballads and 4 madrigals. All this written in vulgar language (unlike his letters) and gathered in his totemic Song bookwhat It occupied his life from 1335 until the end.
He maintained influence in the papal curia with the Colonnas. In 1341, messing around here and there, he managed to get René of Anjou (king of Naples, Lord of Provence and Rome) to grant him the poet’s laurel, recognition to which Dante aspired in vain. It was April 8 and in the Roman Capitol, during a lavish and solemn ceremony. This definitely propelled him.