With a conversation by Prof. Francesca Neri, the “perception of the Ancient” included in the cycle, Thursday 2 May, at 5 pm, in the Giuffrè room of the Villetta De Nava, the Anassilaos cultural association and the De Nava library, with the patronage of the Municipality, will pay homage to Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) on the 650th anniversary of the death of the poet who, together with Dante and Boccaccio, constitutes the triad of the greats of Italian literature of the fourteenth century.
An anniversary that has so far gone almost unnoticed even though we find ourselves faced with an artist whose style is
whose predominantly love themes, the so-called “Petrarchism”, constituted an essential model for all lyric and love poets up to the sixteenth century, while in the nineteenth century, in the Risorgimento phase, the patriotic poet was highlighted in him, that of song All’Italia with the famous verses “vertú contra furore will take arms, and let the fight be short: because the ancient valor in the Italian hearts is not yet dead” which Machiavelli will insert at the conclusion of his “Prince” .
Petrarch also contributed, together with Boccaccio, in a substantial way, to the rediscovery of that antiquity and of those Latin and Greek authors almost “buried” in the monasteries of Europe, whose rediscovery and knowledge, in a few years’ time, will open the on to Humanism and the Renaissance. It is therefore not without reason that scholars have spoken, in the case of Aretino, of pre-humanism, an attitude towards the ancient world to which, it is always worth remembering, two Calabrians of Reggio origin, Barlaam and Leonzio Pilato, gave a fundamental contribution.
The first, a native of Seminara, was a Basilian monk and spent part of his life at the court of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus, of whom he was then ambassador to Pope Benedict XII (1334-1342) in Avignon in 1339 in an attempt to unify the Catholic and Orthodox churches after the schism of 1054.
In the seat of the papacy Barlaam, who later died in 1347 as Bishop of Gerace, met Petrarca who had him as a teacher as he himself writes in a passage from the work “De suis ipsius et multorum ignorantia”: “Many of his writings (by Plato) I saw them, I saw them with these eyes, especially in the house of the Calabrian Barlaam, a modern prototype of Greek wisdom. It was he who began to teach me Greek when I still didn’t know Latin and perhaps he would have succeeded in making me learn it, if envious death had not taken it from me and had not crushed a noble initiative…”
The other, perhaps a pupil of Barlaam, met Petrarch in Padua in the winter of 1358-1359 and the poet asked him for a first partial translation of the Iliad. The subsequent and important role played by Pilate in Florence in the diffusion of the Greek language and literature, thanks to Boccaccio, is part of the great history of Italian Humanism to the birth of which two people from Reggio therefore contributed. The meeting will be introduced by Anassilaos’ poetry manager Pina De Felice, after a greeting from the library manager Daniela Neri, while Daniela Scuncia will take care of the reading.
of Petrarch’s verses.
