«Ab inutili pigraque mole gratiorem in speciem hanc». L’apprendistato letterario di Ludovico Ariosto tra i “contemporanei suoi”

After a brief report on the 'status quaestionis' of criticism on the Latin poems by Ariosto, the essay aims to put in evidence the debts the young Ludovico incurred in relation to the humanistic poets of his age : against the opinion of Cesare Segre, who believed that the young author of Orlando furioso was influenced in his Carmina only by classic authors (above all Tibullus, Catullus, Ovid, Horace...) and was immune to the more contemporaneous influence of neo-Latin poetry, a meticulous screening of his Latin poems – nowadays made possible by informatics tools – lets us know, on the contrary, how much and how deeply Ariosto read humanistic poets like Michael Marullo, Baptista Mantuan, Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, and Fausto Andrelini. Some of the verses of these poets are simply replicated to create the sense of a vague poetic recollection, while others seem to establish semantic correspondences with Ariosto’s verses.