Petrarca e la lirica

This essay investigates the Latin translations of Italian lyric poetry in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on the central role of Francesco Petrarca and the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the practice of rendering vernacular lyric into Latin emerges as a privileged lens through which to observe the formation of a transnational poetic canon. Initially concentrated almost exclusively on Petrarch and cultivated within Italian humanist circles, these translations functioned as both homage to a “modern classic” and as a workshop for assimilating his lexical, stylistic, and affective “grammar” into Neo-Latin elegy. The study traces three major phases: the humanist and elegiac reinterpretation of Petrarch in Renaissance Italy; the European diffusion of Latinized Petrarch during the later sixteenth century as part of a broader phenomenon of “Latin Petrarchism”; and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shift toward anthologization and technical refinement. Over time, the ideological and programmatic force of the translations gradually yielded to a more erudite and technical conception of the practice, culminating in large-scale collections that systematized both Petrarch and other Italian lyric poets within a Latin framework. Despite the progressive expansion of the canon to include figures such as Pietro Bembo, Torquato Tasso, and Ludovico Ariosto, Petrarch consistently retains quantitative and symbolic primacy. The essay argues that Latin translations were not primarily instruments for making Italian poetry accessible to non-Italian readers, but rather vehicles for consolidating and disseminating a Petrarchan poetic code that became structurally embedded in the literary culture of early modern Europe.