Introduction

After Francesco Petrarch (b. 1304) died in Arquà on the night of 19 July 1374, there was a flurry of reactions from all over the Italic Peninsula and beyond. ^{Footnote 1} Various forms of consolatory and eulogistic rhetoric in prose and verse continued his public fashioning as the preeminent intellectual and poet of his age, equal or superior to his classical forebears. Yet the works written in the aftermath of his death often go beyond merely praising Petrarch and canonizing his works, inasmuch as they lay claim to civic ownership of his legacy. The problem that arose after his death was not only the grief of his admirers at the loss of their teacher or their concern about gaining access to his undistributed and unfinished works, but also the location of the city that would own and propagate his glory in the future. ^{Footnote 2} The interment of Petrarch’s body in the tiny village of Arquà assured that the birthplace of his legacy would be the Paduan court of Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara (1325–93) and the university and intellectual culture that his rule fostered. Petrarch’s Paduan cohort established its claim to honor Petrarch’s body in Arquà and even argued internally about whether his remains should be moved to Padua. The placement of his legacy in Paduan territory, however, caused anxiety, especially among those of his friends associated with Florence.

During Petrarch’s life, Florence’s relationship with the poet was strained. Born in Arezzo to a Florentine family that had been banished for perpetuity in 1302 during the same purge that led to the exile of Dante, Petrarch visited Florence only twice in his life, on a trip to and from Rome during the Jubilee of 1350. At Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–75) encouragement, the city offered him a place in its studium in 1351 along with the land lost by his family in exile. Boccaccio’s quasi-hagiographic biography of Petrarch, De Vita et Moribus Francisci Petracchi de Florentia (On the life and customs of Francesco Petrarch of Florence), was written on this occasion in order to help convince the local government of Petrarch’s importance for the city. ^{Footnote 3} Boccaccio’s effort to bring Petrarch to Florence during this period was closely linked to his recuperation of Dante’s reputation in the city. The two poets were, for Boccaccio, the foundation of the cultural heritage that he sought to ground in Florence, despite their political alienation from the city. ^{Footnote 4} When Petrarch summarily refused the first offer to live in Florence, moving instead to the Visconti court in Milan, his Florentine friends, first among whom was Boccaccio, reacted with acrimony and Florence quickly revoked the invitation.

Petrarch’s friends in Florence renewed their efforts to repatriate him at least twice more before his death. In 1363, as is demonstrated below, military leader and nobleman Roberto Guidi of Battifolle (ca. 1315–75) tried to convince the poet to take up residence in his lands in the Casentino, near the Camaldolensian hermitage at Pratovecchio, where Petrarch visited him in 1364. Just a year later, in 1365, Florence offered him a canonry in its cathedral and even received papal approval for it, but again Petrarch refused. ^{Footnote 5} In 1369 Petrarch moved from Venice to Padua, and by 1370 his country residence in Arquà had become his home. Due to recurrent illness and a debilitating stroke suffered in Ravenna on his way to Rome in 1370, he remained in poor health for the rest of his life and was unable to travel far. ^{Footnote 6} It is largely thanks to Boccaccio’s continual casting of Petrarch as a Florentine that Florence is considered Petrarch’s intellectual homeland, where he was “nourished at the breast of the Muses.” ^{Footnote 7} By the time of his death in 1374, Florence had tried and failed to recall Petrarch to his ancestral patria three times. At the moment of his passing, the sentiment remained among certain Florentines that at least Petrarch’s fame, if not also his body, belonged to Florence.

In examining the reactions to Petrarch’s death, scholars have largely ignored or underplayed the civic importance of the praise of Petrarch in the documents that survive. ^{Footnote 8} Prey to the rhetoric of these compositions, they have focused instead on how the cult of personality that surrounded Petrarch in life continued to grow much like that of a saint. In fact, Concetta Bianca has traced the myth of Petrarch as humanist back to this moment, while Andrea Tilatti has compared the posthumous reverence for Petrarch with fourteenth-century cults of saints, noticing in passing the civic import of the public fashioning of Petrarch’s image. ^{Footnote 9} In his survey of the mourners of Petrarch, Benjamin G. Kohl noted the uniformity of praise of Petrarch, which “stressed his fine personal habits, his penchant for prayer and fasting, and the seriousness with which he took his Christian faith . . . his great intellectual abilities—his capacity for study, his prodigious memory, and his accomplished Latin style and elegant diction,” but recognized only superficially that “Florentine writers, including Boccaccio and Sacchetti, claimed him as a brilliant son of the Arno city” while, “conversely, Zenone da Pistoia saw him as an outstanding example of Paduan culture.” ^{Footnote 10} It is not a matter of chance, however, that Florentine writers and those in Padua claimed Petrarch as their own, nor is it just a sign of their devotion or admiration. Rather, the documents composed in lament of Petrarch’s death show signs of a provincial political conflict both between Padua and Florence and within Padua itself. In readings of orations, letters, and poems about Petrarch’s death composed in Paduan and Florentine intellectual circles, with which the first part of this essay is concerned, the well-known praise of Petrarch in these texts is shown to be a function of a political competition over his remains and, with them, over the rightful location of his legacy.

If Boccaccio’s De Vita Petracchi had sought to cast Petrarch as a Florentine in order to justify his repatriation while alive, then the Florentine compositions on his passing worked to legitimate the placement of Petrarch’s legacy there after his death, while the Paduans, following Petrarch’s testament, vindicated their own right to keep his body and works there where he died. A recognition of the political situation surrounding Petrarch’s place of burial leads to a second, related observation about Boccaccio’s letter on Petrarch’s death, addressed to Petrarch’s son-in-law and heir, Francescuolo da Brossano (d. 1405), which stands out among the other responses for its rhetorical sophistication and cultural sensitivity. By reading the letter within its proper political context, restored by the first half of this essay, it becomes manifest how Boccaccio intervenes in a largely provincial political debate with farsighted theoretical coherence and cosmopolitan political ambition. Animated by a familiar vernacular poetics, Boccaccio theorizes an intellectual entombment of Petrarch in Florence that is consonant with his ongoing cultural project, based on the retrieval and propagation in Florence of Petrarch’s works alongside those of Dante—a project that established Boccaccio himself as the sacrificial hero of Florence’s nascent cultural tradition.

Between Padua and Florence: The Politics of Petrarch’s Burial Place

The effort to place Petrarch’s legacy begins with the funerary oration delivered by Augustinian friar Bonaventura Badoer (ca. 1332–85) on 24 July 1374. ^{Footnote 11} Before a crowd of dignitaries, including Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara and the patriarch of Aquileia, Marquard of Randeck (ca. 1300–81), Badoer seeks to memorialize Petrarch not only as an intellectual, but also as a holy man. He first links the Aretine poet to Florence, but exclusively in immaterial terms related to the etymology of the city’s name, as the sweet scent emanating from the flower of Florence. Rome, too, is granted importance for hosting the poet laureate in 1341, and yet Badoer describes Rome both before and after Petrarch’s laureation as empty, sterile, and debased. The city’s past greatness was fulfilled only for a single year; after his death, Badoer declares, Rome again became empty. Padua is mentioned last in the series of Petrarch’s cities: it alone is singled out for its grief, as Petrarch’s mother church and as the center from which his spiritual light reached the entire world. Uniquely among the three cities, Padua is represented as Petrarch’s home and as the birthplace of a new Petrarchan rule. ^{Footnote 12}

The first two cities’ relationship with Petrarch had begun when he was alive and was experienced in terms of his absence; only Padua was wed to him in his living presence. Toward the end of what survives of his funeral oration, Badoer addresses his patron and the land in which Petrarch is buried, evoking the bond of friendship with Francesco da Carrara that will keep Petrarch’s body there and the importance that it will give to the territory: “Neither the seat of Rome nor the imperial throne could confer on you as much glory as the body that is buried in you.” ^{Footnote 13} The Augustinian friar establishes the foundations of Petrarch’s postmortem cultural importance for the lord of Padua. For Badoer, who begins the process of Petrarch’s secular beatification, ^{Footnote 14} Petrarch belongs to Padua, his true widow and the ordained location of his legacy.

The first response to Petrarch’s death to be sent from Florence is in a postscript to a letter dated 25 July 1374 from Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) to Giovanni Malpaghini (1346–1417), Petrarch’s former scribe who was likely teaching in Bologna at the time. ^{Footnote 15} Salutati asks for confirmation about Petrarch’s death, uncertain if it were just rumor. ^{Footnote 16} Malpaghini responded to Salutati quickly with his Conquestus de morte Petrarce (Lament on the death of Petrarch) in August 1374, expressing his sadness and defining Petrarch’s death as the “loss of our generation” and the “public calamity of the present age.” ^{Footnote 17} He also recommends that Salutati not overly grieve his passing, lest he unknowingly commit some injustice against Petrarch’s legacy. ^{Footnote 18} He goes on to say that Petrarch is not really dead, since his soul is in heaven for eternity and his fame on earth is secured by his many works. He concludes his letter with an acknowledgment of the effect of Petrarch’s death on Florence and the world: “In sum, in his age he was the only one above all other mortals who gave not less sadness to the world when dead, than he did joy to his homeland when alive.” ^{Footnote 19} This conclusion juxtaposes Florence’s fluctuating pride and joy in Petrarch when he was alive to the sadness that his passing causes for the entire world. While resonating with Petrarch’s own rhetoric of stylized disengagement with the world, Malpaghini’s recommendation that Salutati not weep because of Petrarch’s death also indicates his worry that the excessive grief expressed by Petrarch’s followers would contradict Petrarch’s own views about the limited value of life in the here and now. Salutati did not respond to Malpaghini’s letter until March of the next year, but in the meantime, he repeated Malpaghini’s recommendation in a letter on Petrarch’s death sent to Roberto Guidi, Count of Battifolle, on 16 August 1374. Before discussing this letter, however, it is helpful to consider a contemporaneous funerary poem, which sheds light on the political import of Petrarch’s death.

Of the philo-Florentine writers to respond to Petrarch’s death, Giovanni Quatrario da Sulmona (ca. 1336–1402) most clearly expresses the political problem represented by Petrarch’s burial in Arquà and even goes so far as to suggest a military effort to recover his body. Quatrario was a Sulmonese self-taught man of letters who became acquainted with Petrarch because of their mutual friendship with Barbato da Sulmona (ca. 1304–64), but he was also connected to Petrarch’s admirers in Florence and Naples, such as Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò Acciaiuoli (1310–65). ^{Footnote 20} On 20 August 1374 he sent from Sicily to Florence a Carmen Funereum de Morte Petrarce (Funereal song on the death of Petrarch). Throughout the poem Quatrario idealizes Petrarch and laments his death, repeating many of the commonplaces that inform other laments of his friend’s passing. In conclusion to the poem, however, he turns to the question of Petrarch’s tomb:

This ornamented pyramidal tomb on top of Cyrrha, one of the twin peaks of Parnassus, seems purely rhetorical when associated with the idealizing tone that leads up to it. Yet, after a few lines describing the grief of the Muses, Quatrario contrasts their sincerity with the lack of care that Florence demonstrates for its native son. The final lines of the poem take on another voice, exhortative and no longer plaintive, that makes the gilt-lettered tomb seem far less idealized:

Exhorting Florence to action, Quatrario insists on the preeminence of Petrarch’s Florentine origins. The imagery of a tomb on the Cyrrhean peak of Parnassus takes on a concrete political dimension. It seems that, here, Florence and Padua, perhaps represented as the twin peaks of Parnassus, had developed a political animosity over the fate of Petrarch’s body. Although Petrarch never regarded himself as a Florentine and never gave any sense that he would ever reside there, Quatrario claims for Florence the right to fight a just war in order to bring back his remains and install them in a florid, marble tomb. If, for Badoer, Arquà would be the sun from which Petrarch’s holy rays would emanate, replacing both Florence and Rome, then, for Quatrario, Padua was an impostor and, in the final play on words, even the Roman Capitoline became Florentine with the flourishing caused by Petrarch’s laurel crown. The civic contention that this poem discloses underlies Coluccio Salutati’s letter to Roberto Guidi.

After his correspondence with Giovanni Malpaghini, Salutati composed his only surviving lament of Petrarch’s death for one of the most revered military commanders in Florence. ^{Footnote 23} Together with his brother Carlo, Roberto Guidi controlled the land in the Casentino and was bound to Florence by a pact of accomandigia, a mutual allegiance that required him to provide his services in war and to pay an annual tax to the city, but also guaranteed the city’s recognition and protection of his feudal rights over the lands he had inherited in the Casentino. ^{Footnote 24} In 1363 he contributed to Florence’s siege of Pisa and in 1369 he was named commander of the Florentine army in its siege of San Miniato, whose rebellion against Florence was subsidized by the Visconti. After securing the city for Florence, Guidi was given a small triumph and was absolved of his debts and financial obligations to the city. ^{Footnote 25} Guidi’s relationship with Florence was solely military in nature, but his correspondence with Petrarch has led to his exaggerated characterization as an enlightened humanist knight. ^{Footnote 26}

Guidi’s relationship with Petrarch began when the poet sent him a letter from Venice, likely upon recommendation of Pandolfo Malatesta (ca. 1325–73), saying that he would like to meet him and to see the Apennines. ^{Footnote 27} Guidi responded to Petrarch’s letter by inviting him to visit the Casentino, where he would find the Camaldolensians and the sources of the Arno and Tiber, ^{Footnote 28} but he expressed his surprise at Petrarch’s lack of care for Florence. ^{Footnote 29} Petrarch’s subsequent response justified his absence by saying that Florence had neglected him, ^{Footnote 30} to which Guidi responded in turn by asking him not to deny Florence his presence: “May the ingratitude of your homeland, which you imagine, not make you bitter. If [Florence] neglects you when you are absent, once you are present it will honor the lofty majesty of your dogma.” ^{Footnote 31} In 1364, following an official trip to Bologna, Petrarch finally visited Guidi briefly in the Casentino, after which Petrarch wrote to him again to thank him, but refusing any offer to live there. ^{Footnote 32} Guidi’s role in this failed repatriation of Petrarch is unclear, but given Petrarch’s distrust of the Florentine people and his preference for protection by independent lords, Guidi could have been a potential patron, located at a safe—if unprecedented—distance from the city.

Thus, when examining Salutati’s letter to Guidi, it must not be forgotten that Guidi’s relationship with Florence was military and his connection with Petrarch was one of refused patronage. In the letter, Salutati turns to Petrarch’s spiritual impact in an effort to diffuse any violent action on the part of his addressee. In the opening salutation, Salutati alludes to the fact that Guidi had already been contacted by others in Florence and that his own letter will concern something different:

Salutati singles out Guidi as a friend of Petrarch, addressing his letter not to the nobleman interested in war, hunting, or birding, but to the man who shares his interest in letters, just as Petrarch had done in his own letters to Guidi. From this point of departure, the letter transforms Petrarch’s legacy into a spiritual matter, never once bringing up Padua or Arquà. Even regarding Florence, Salutati mentions the city’s grief only alongside that of Rome and the rest of the world. Like Badoer, he refers to Petrarch as a source of light, but the civic context of his passing is quickly absorbed by the universal lament that involves the entire world of Petrarch’s friends. ^{Footnote 34}

Salutati’s letter reacts to the dangers of the provincialism that informed responses by others such as Quatrario by taking as a model the spiritual attitude that defined Petrarch’s career:

In this address to death, Salutati plays down the importance of Petrarch’s body by referring to it with the diminutive corpusculum and by belittling death’s victory over it. The aggressive language of competition is furthermore displaced from the world of bodies into the spiritual realm. Petrarch’s battle with death has already been fought and won. There is no longer any need to fight. In the context of the political posturing of a figure like Quatrario and those who had already written to Guidi, Salutati’s lack of concern for the body and his insistence on the soul take on a political significance. Salutati seems to recommend that just as Petrarch himself had avoided the power and violence of death, so Petrarch’s admirers should refuse to consider the least important part of Petrarch’s being. The characterization of death could also be seen indirectly as a reaction to the pride of those in possession of Petrarch’s body. Salutati finds that Petrarch’s literary and philosophical legacy—more valuable than his body—is placeless and belongs to his friends everywhere.

The letter to Guidi thus focuses on the greatness of that legacy, parts of which remain to be seen by his followers. In its conclusion, Salutati compares Petrarch to Hermes Trismegistus, presenting his absence as the prerequisite for his future spiritual leadership:

This exemplary tale echoes Salutati’s words to death, again referring to the body with corpusculum. The references to life as exile or pilgrimage and to the voyage to heaven as a sort of repatriation, typically Neoplatonic, evoke nonetheless the realities of Petrarch’s life and the hopes of returning him to Florence. By transforming into spiritual matters the historical realities surrounding Petrarch’s death, however, Salutati attenuates any political tension. The connection with Hermes Trismegistus establishes Petrarch as a spiritual leader of a circle of friends that will continue even more strongly after his death. Salutati endeavors to maintain Petrarch as the head of a new school of thought centered upon the virtues of the man, his works, and his exemplary life, not upon his material remains. If Guidi had possessed any desire to retrieve Petrarch’s bones on behalf of the city, it seems that Salutati was successful in dissuading him from it. Some still remained, however, who were concerned with finding a way to honor Petrarch’s body in Florence.

A month later, in fact, in a letter dated September 19, Luigi Marsili (ca. 1342–94), an Augustinian friar from Florence who had known Petrarch in Padua and who was also an acquaintance of Boccaccio, wrote from Paris to Guido del Palagio (ca. 1335–99) concerning Petrarch’s death. ^{Footnote 37} A young Florentine from a wealthy family of wool traders who would become very influential in Florentine politics, Del Palagio had written to Marsili in late July or early August to inform him of Petrarch’s death. Del Palagio’s letter, now lost, was sent to Marsili in Bruges as he was leaving Florence for Venice to escape an onslaught of the plague that had hit Florence near the end of July. ^{Footnote 38} He had hoped to visit Petrarch on his way, since he had never had the opportunity to meet him in person. Marsili’s response alludes to the desire among Florentines, mentioned in the earlier letter by a sympathetic Del Palagio, to honor Petrarch somehow in death: “The citizens of Florence did not want to experience him and if they did want it, they did not know how to do so, as Solomon says: ‘The lazy man both wants and does not want to work.’ And now I do not think that they are more eager to honor his body than in the past they were to revere the whole man, when his noblest part was present. I would like, more out of love for their honor than for anything else, that, even if late, they would stir to do their duty.” ^{Footnote 39} Marsili’s letter evidences a concern in Florence over what to do about Petrarch’s body. Like Quatrario, Marsili portrays the Florentines as lazy in honoring Petrarch, comparing the wavering commitment of the Florentine government to invite Petrarch there in the early 1350s to a similarly unstable desire to honor his body. Whereas Quatrario is exhortative and hyperbolic in his rhetoric, Marsili, with Augustinian remove, is more realistic in his expectations of the Florentine citizens. He does not deceive himself that the nature of the people will change and he sees through the provincial political ideology behind an effort to repatriate Petrarch’s cadaver. Like Salutati in his letter to Guidi, he redirects Del Palagio’s attention onto Petrarch’s soul and virtues, which are exemplified by both his life and his works. His vague concluding remark does not address the righteousness of Florence’s desire to honor Petrarch’s body, but leaves open the possibility that the city will find some other way to show its reverence for him.

While the Florentine responses to Petrarch’s death indicate that the recuperation of Petrarch’s legacy developed in reaction to the location of his body in Arquà and to the desire of some in Florence to vie for it, the only other response to come from Padua makes it clear that there was indeed a clash over his burial place. In late October, an otherwise unknown Pistoian named Zenone Zenoni, a follower of Petrarch who did not know Latin, penned a vernacular poem for Francesco da Carrara in commemoration of Petrarch’s death. ^{Footnote 40} Written in terza rima and in imitation of Petrarch’s Triumphi (Triumphs), the thirteen chapters of his Pietosa fonte (Fount of compassion) describe an allegorical scene set in a garden in which Jove presides over the other gods, the seven liberal arts, the Muses, and other attendees, all of whom lament Petrarch’s passing. At the end, Petrarch is led through the garden by Apollo, Minerva, and a train of seventy philosophers, and is accompanied to heaven by a host of angels.

A large section of the poem is dedicated to Florence, which is personified as a widowed woman dressed in black, whose complaint occupies more than two entire chapters. At the end of chapter 5, Florence begins by asking Jove why he has taken so many of the feathers from her wings and continues her lament in the next chapter by addressing the loss of five of her famous citizens in the years prior to Petrarch’s death: Zanobi da Strada (d. 1361), Niccolò Acciaiuoli (d. 1365), Paolo dell’Abbaco (d. 1374), Manno Donati (d. ca. 1370), and Tommaso del Garbo (d. 1370). ^{Footnote 41} Petrarch, the reader understands, is just one of a number of recent Florentines to be taken from her, several of whom did not live in Florence and are not buried there. ^{Footnote 42} In chapter 7, Florence continues with her monologue about Petrarch, until, at the beginning of chapter 8, a procession of the liberal arts and the Muses interrupts her, allowing for no response from Jove. The celebration of Petrarch’s achievements, in a new kind of laureation ceremony, takes place there despite Florence’s complaint.

The poem is the Paduan equivalent in vernacular of Quatrario’s eccentric and polemical Latin poem from a few months earlier. Zenoni, who as a Pistoian felt no great love for Florence, ^{Footnote 43} represents the city as not being able to hold on to her own illustrious citizens, but only those of other cities, and as having had a troubled relationship with Petrarch:

Zenoni’s lines belittle the city’s feeling of attachment to the poet, inasmuch as its desire to bring him back is shared by every other city. At the same time, they parody the disappointment of many Florentines with their city’s lack of appreciation for Petrarch while alive and its lack of effort to bring him back to his ancestral city, just as Marsili had expressed to Del Palagio with a more consoling tone in his earlier letter.

After Petrarch’s ascension, Zenoni concludes his poem with an encomium of his patron, Francesco da Carrara, and of the village of Arquà. He signals his awareness of the precariousness of Petrarch’s resting place there:

While the village may want to celebrate its new status, ^{Footnote 46} it will have to argue to maintain its legal right to keep Petrarch’s body. Another party will claim that they have suffered a danno (loss or damage), recalling Florence’s lament about her own danno from earlier in the poem. Zenoni knows that the envy of other cities will lead Arquà into a dispute with them, but also that this same envy will allow it to acquire a reputation that will reach as far as Mount Parnassus. In the lines that follow, after referring to a no-longer-extant vernacular composition sent to Arquà by Boccaccio, ^{Footnote 47} Zenoni warns Arquà about the pretensions of these other cities:

With the mention of Boccaccio set between the claim of Arquà’s new poetic glory and the description of the threat that it represents to other cities, which envy Arquà and desire to honor Petrarch’s body, it is plausible to read these lines as a reference to the Florentine sentiments documented above. The only city to express envy for Arquà within the Pietosa fonte is, in fact, Florence. ^{Footnote 49} The legal norm that would substantiate Arqua’s claim to remain Petrarch’s burial site is, of course, Petrarch’s testament, which stipulated that he be buried in the place where he died. ^{Footnote 50}

Finally, in opposition to anyone who would take away Petrarch’s body, Zenoni exhorts Arquà to trust in the good sense of Francescuolo da Brossano and in Petrarch’s affection for Francesco da Carrara. He reiterates the ties of family and patronage that linked Petrarch to Arquà, remarking that Brossano, husband to Petrarch’s natural daughter, Francesca, will make the final decision about his place of burial. Zenoni is hopeful that Brossano will make a prudent choice in consultation with da Carrara, who would naturally influence the outcome of any debate. Arquà, in the end, could remain hopeful that these individuals would respect Petrarch’s wishes. ^{Footnote 51} Along with the philo-Florentine testimonials, the Pietosa fonte demonstrates the tenuous political situation surrounding Petrarch’s final place of burial. Zenoni’s perspective, like that of Quatrario, Del Palagio, and the Florentines to whom Salutati’s letter to Guidi responds, is markedly provincial. His concerns with Petrarch’s body and the fame associated with it are circumscribed by an amor patriae that stops at the boundary of the tiny village of Arquà. It is within this galvanized context that Boccaccio writes his letter to Brossano about how to honor properly the memory of Petrarch. If in their letters Salutati and Marsili had already tried to diffuse the tensions in Florentine circles caused by such a provincial mindset by spiritualizing the concerns about Petrarch’s body, Boccaccio would intervene directly in the situation in Padua, while at the same time theorizing an intellectual entombment and cosmopolitan reception of Petrarch based in Florence.

Placing Petrarch in Florence: Boccaccio’s Cosmopolitan Cultural Politics

Just after Zenoni composed his poem, a copy of which may have been sent to Florence, ^{Footnote 52} on October 20, Boccaccio received the first official notification of Petrarch’s death from Francescuolo da Brossano. Boccaccio’s last surviving letter, dated November 3, is written in response to Brossano. Besides its employment of the typical consolatory and eulogistic tropes common to all of the compositions about Petrarch’s death, Boccaccio’s letter primarily addresses the nature of Petrarch’s tomb and his connection to Florence and Arquà. His words to Petrarch’s son-in-law, as Jonathan Usher has noticed, are “far from being a spontaneous outpouring of grief,” but the letter is also not merely a “carefully composed piece of consolatory rhetoric.” ^{Footnote 53} Instead, Boccaccio both communicates in his missive a warning against building an elaborate tomb for Petrarch in Arquà and makes clear that in Florence he has in mind a different kind of monument for his friend.

While scholars have mostly taken this letter at its word, reading it as an expression of consolation by a wise old friend who communicates his concern for the works of his teacher Petrarch, ^{Footnote 54} most recently Usher has pointed out that Boccaccio’s concern for the written works of Petrarch and his seeming rejection of the idea of a tomb for Petrarch fit the paradigm that he had used for the repatriation and monumentalization of the memory and works of Dante earlier in his career: that is, in the absence of a body for a tomb, he aims at a monument made by biography and commentary on the author’s works. ^{Footnote 55} Although Boccaccio was indeed concerned with the fate of Petrarch’s works, the kind of monument that he suggests goes beyond the mere collection and annotation of them. Boccaccio lays the foundations for an intellectual entombment of Petrarch in Florence by distinguishing the Florentine reception of Petrarch from that in Arquà and Padua.

The letter opens with a reference to the exact date when Boccaccio received Brossano’s letter announcing Petrarch’s death, almost three months after the fact:

Besides the consolatory reference to the happiness of Petrarch’s passing out of the exile of life, which echoes the Neoplatonism of Salutati’s anecdote about Hermes Trismegistus, Boccaccio pointedly notes that he only received Brossano’s letter three months after his friend’s death. Since none of their common friends had written to him either, in the meantime Boccaccio found out about it from the vulgus predicans (proclaiming crowd), which was scorned by Petrarch for most of his life. The preaching of the people is precisely what Petrarch had sought to avoid when he decided not to join Boccaccio in Florence in 1353.

After their first meeting, Boccaccio and Petrarch had experienced a political disagreement linked to Petrarch’s refusal to take up residence in Florence, where he thought the crowd made the government unstable and isolated. Petrarch preferred the rigid political structure of the courts of Northern Italian princes, where his livelihood was more secure and where he could have a direct impact on international events, rather than the more volatile political situation of a republic like Florence. Boccaccio, however, was dedicated to the more chaotic and diverse political environment of the republic, where he fostered culture through the promotion of the city’s greatest writers in Latin and the vernacular alongside instruction in ancient Greek and other disciplines. ^{Footnote 57} Such different political and cultural affinities manifest themselves in their respective poetics, with Petrarch’s well-known program of creating a new Roman culture and Boccaccio’s championing of a hybrid vernacular culture, each of which appear in their epistolary exchanges, especially those regarding Dante and the vernacular. ^{Footnote 58} In the letter to Brossano, therefore, the reference to the crowd immediately evokes a charged element of their complicated relationship and gives the letter both a political and a poetic valence. ^{Footnote 59}

The question of Dante and the vernacular, in fact, is central to the way in which Boccaccio is approaching Petrarch’s legacy here. He mentions his lectures on Dante, continuing the letter in a similar vein by bringing up another typical Petrarchan nemesis—physicians. Boccaccio would have gone to Petrarch’s funeral, but he was sick at the time: “But the tenth month had already passed since I was reading publicly in the city Dante’s Comedy and I was struck with a dangerous illness that was longer and more tedious than any other crisis. While, for four months, by the insistence of friends, I was following the advice of I won’t say doctors, but quacks, it continually grew worse. In fact, with potions and fasts my nutritive power was forced out of orbit from its usual order, with the result that I became so weak it is hardly believable to whoever has not experienced it, as is clear enough to whoever sees how I look.” ^{Footnote 60} By dating his own illness in relation to his lectures on Dante, Boccaccio establishes himself politically and culturally within a different group than that of Petrarch’s Paduan followers, setting the tone for the rest of the letter. The reference to following the advice of friends to see a doctor situates Boccaccio within his own circle of friends in Florence and Certaldo. Although Boccaccio had no special admiration for doctors, which is clear from his use of the term fabulones (quacks), ^{Footnote 61} he stages his recourse to their cures within the purview of friendship: Boccaccio follows the suggestions of friends, even if the consequences on his body turn out to be less than optimal. ^{Footnote 62} Unlike Boccaccio, Petrarch had insisted on continuing his intellectual labor despite his bad health and against the advice of Boccaccio himself, who, in his final letter to his friend in 1373, had asked him to desist and try to live longer out of love for his friends. ^{Footnote 63}

This paragraph is followed by a description of the pitiful state of Boccaccio’s bodily health, which Tobias Gittes has connected to Boccaccio’s representation of himself as a Prometheus-like civilizing figure, or culture hero. ^{Footnote 64} According to Gittes, in his late sonnets Boccaccio’s view of his debilitating illness as divine retribution for having “vilely prostrated the Muses / in the brothels of the miserable crowd” is not a sign of capitulation to critics of his public readings and explanations of the Commedia’s allegorical significance, but rather “a sophisticated bid to displace blame from himself to his critics while simultaneously enhancing his own stature.” ^{Footnote 65} In sonnet 122, Boccaccio evokes his bodily state in a way that is echoed in his later letter:

The skin removed from Marsyas’s body after being flayed by Apollo becomes the bag of winds given to Odysseus by Aeolus to arrive more quickly in Ithaca. Odysseus’s men opened it in the mistaken belief that there was treasure inside, but it only caused them to be blown farther off course. ^{Footnote 67} The bag that Boccaccio has become here, however, is filled with a heavy lead that prevents him from moving. Boccaccio is setting himself up as the sacrificial victim of the god of poetry, who punishes him for his hubris at having brought knowledge to the people.

Thus, in the letter to Brossano, Boccaccio describes his own state in stark contrast to that of Petrarch:

Like Petrarch, Boccaccio has been moved away from his patria, but only to his ancestral lands in Certaldo and not to the Apennines, where Petrarch could have relocated at the behest of friends. While Boccaccio is confined to the deflated sack of his sickly body, however, in death Petrarch was finally able to escape the flesh and become pure spirit. If in the sonnet Boccaccio is a disastrous bag of lead that keeps his ship from arriving in port, then in the letter the same ship is left without a captain by Petrarch’s death. The rhetorical development of the opening paragraphs of the letter—from the crowd to Dante to Boccaccio’s illness—evokes Boccaccio’s own cultural politics and poetics in a way that sets his activities apart from those of the men who attend to Petrarch’s tomb in Arquà. Yet, at the same time, Boccaccio’s distinct cultural project, his ship, is depicted as connected to and even reliant upon Petrarch. ^{Footnote 69}

In the longest section of the letter, Boccaccio addresses the most pressing question for him and his Florentine friends—Petrarch’s place of burial and the nature of his tomb:

Usher has noted that Brossano’s proposal to build a tomb for Petrarch was “directly counter to Petrarch’s own will and testament, which specifically stipulated modest, humble burial.” ^{Footnote 71} Whether or not Boccaccio knew of the stipulations of Petrarch’s testament, he is acutely aware that Petrarch’s body, which once housed all his learning when alive, will grant to little Arquà—with or without a tomb—a civic significance of historic proportion. For Boccaccio, it is a sign of Petrarch’s humility that he chose to be buried in Arquà, and not of some merit specific to the location. In this he echoes the worries of his compatriots and tries to deflate the importance of Petrarch’s patrons and followers in Padua.

Boccaccio finds that Arquà’s insignificance is ironically appropriate, comparing it with the modest burial places of Virgil, Ovid, and Homer: “For this, Arquà—which is almost unknown to Paduans, not to mention foreigners and remote nations—will be recognized and its name will be prized by the whole world, not otherwise than we mentally cherish the hills of Posillipo even if we have never seen them, since the bones of Virgil are located at their roots; it will be honored like Tomis and Phasis, the extreme locales of the Black Sea that hold the tomb of Pelignian Naso, and Homer’s Smirna, and other similar places.” ^{Footnote 72} The place of burial, although humble, becomes the monument itself of the poet in the imaginations of readers. Precisely because Arquà is unknown to the world, including the nearby Paduans, any significance that it acquires will be associated with Petrarch. One need not even see or know the place in order to venerate it. Yet Boccaccio was also fully aware that Virgil was known as a Mantuan, that Ovid was, in fact, Pelignian, and that multiple cities claimed to be Homer’s birthplace; ^{Footnote 73} so Petrarch, too, would end up surpassing his modest place of burial through an association with his ancestral patria.

Boccaccio goes on to imagine that the sailor returning from the farthest reaches of the ocean will return to the Adriatic Sea and, gazing at the Euganean Hills, will declare: “Here we see the hills that hold in their depths the glory of the world, who was once the temple of all dogmas, Petrarch, the sweet-singing poet, and who was long ago crowned by command of the Senate with the triumphal laurel in the nourishing city of Rome, and so many of his praiseworthy books remain, such brilliant testimony of most holy fame!” ^{Footnote 74} Here, Arquà disappears and becomes the general geographic area of its surroundings, which comes to represent the Rome that had crowned Petrarch poet laureate and the point of origin of his books and his fame, just as Badoer had declared in his oration. As such, the village will attract people from all over the world: “Perhaps at some point the black Indian or the fierce Spaniard or Sarmatian will come, attracted by the admiration of his holy name, and they will look at the tomb of the great man and will pay their respects with pious reverence to the hidden remains.” ^{Footnote 75} Because of Petrarch, Arquà will become the center of the world, despite the importance of Rome as the city representative of Petrarch’s project of cultural renewal and despite the fact that his ancestors were Florentine.

For Boccaccio, Florence—an unhappy homeland—deserves its fate of being denied the honor of safeguarding Petrarch’s ashes because it is unworthy. ^{Footnote 76} He notes, however, with a phrase reminiscent of Marsili’s closing words to Del Palagio, but more final in its acceptance of Florence’s reality: “I would have preferred, nevertheless, whatever you may be, that the honor had been granted to you rather than to Arquà.” ^{Footnote 77} Echoing the hagiographical formulations from a few lines earlier, Boccaccio clarifies the relationship between Florence and Petrarch by explicitly recalling Christ’s words when he is rejected in Nazareth: “Thus it happened that the old truthful saying was confirmed, ‘No one is accepted as a prophet in his homeland.’” ^{Footnote 78} By representing Florence as Petrarch’s Nazareth, Boccaccio places the blame for Petrarch’s absence onto the Florentines and reverses the story of Petrarch’s rejection of the city of his ancestors. Yet, he also implicitly asserts that Florence is, in fact, Petrarch’s patria.

Immediately following this phrase, however, Boccaccio reverses the analogy, associating Nazareth with Arquà and representing Florence as Petrarch’s Jerusalem: “He nevertheless was able to avoid this intentionally, in imitation of the humility of Christ, his lord and redeemer, who wanted to grant the honor of his carnal origin to the Nazarenes rather than to the Jerusalemites, and preferred to have a poor but holy virgin as a mother rather than the important and proud queens of that age.” ^{Footnote 79} By choosing his place of burial in humble Arquà, ^{Footnote 80} Boccaccio insinuates, Petrarch’s intentional imitatio Christi inverts the circumstances of Christ’s places of ancestral origin and of death. And yet, at the same time, Boccaccio’s description of Petrarch’s humility resounds with irony, since he has already told his reader that in Arquà Petrarch’s resting place would become the sole focus of the pilgrims from near and far. By recognizing the significance of Petrarch’s modest burial site for posterity and by proposing Christ’s perfect humility as a model, Boccaccio subtly indicates that at the heart of Petrarch’s intentional humility lay his well-known quest for fame. In Arquà his tomb would not have to compete with the many holy places of Rome, with the tombs of Ambrose in Milan, Augustine or Boethius in Pavia, or with those of Jacopo da Carrara in Padua or Azzo da Correggio in Parma—all places in which he imagined in his testament that he could have been buried. Boccaccio cuts to the core of Petrarch’s own self-fashioning and of the civic refashioning of his reputation as a secular saint, unraveling the rhetoric of praise that envelops the figure of Petrarch in the various responses. The gap between Christ’s choice of carnal origin, as Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, and Petrarch’s choice of mortal resting place, as Petrarch buried-in-Arquà, points to a further, redemptive irony in Boccaccio’s critique of Florence. If, like the Nazarenes, Florence is arrogant, in Boccaccio’s convoluted analogy it also plays the role of Jerusalem, the location of Christ’s resurrection. This suggests that the origin of the secular eternity of Petrarch’s legacy, analogous here to the eternity of hope offered by Christ’s death and resurrection, would be in Florence.

At this point, Boccaccio turns to the symbolic representation of such hope by addressing Brossano’s plans to build a tomb:

Boccaccio cautions Brossano that a magnificent tomb, not unlike that imagined by Quatrario, will not impress the circle of men that surrounded Petrarch in Padua and that followed him from afar. A tomb would have other effects, however, that would be both culturally edificatory and ironically beneficial to Petrarch’s worldly glory among the illiterate crowd. Boccaccio’s suggestion that the ignorant would benefit from a funerary monument to Petrarch is more in tune with Boccaccio’s vernacular poetics than with Petrarch’s cultivation of an elite Neo-Latin cultural revival of ancient Rome. Such a tomb would amount to the vernacularization of Petrarch’s largely Latin legacy.

These lines clearly allude to Gregory the Great’s highly influential and well-known late sixth-century explanation to Serenus, bishop of Marseilles, who had destroyed sacred images in his churches. Gregory had responded by arguing that pictures are like a form of visual writing for the illiterate and so the bishop should not destroy them. ^{Footnote 82} Boccaccio inverts Gregory’s warning to Serenus, however, praising Brossano for his efforts to instruct the ignorant, while counseling that a sculptured tomb would be of no interest for fully literate intellectuals. Instead, if such a tomb might be insignificant in Padua, it would be appropriate, if anywhere, in Florence, where Boccaccio had been lecturing on the recondite meanings of Dante’s Commedia for the benefit of the multitude. Boccaccio’s arguments are carefully constructed and, in fact, resonate with his self-representation in the opening paragraphs of the letter as a culture hero who sacrificed himself for the vulgar crowd. Just as he was revealing the complex, hidden meanings of the Commedia to all Florentines, so he imagines a tomb that might reveal the profound cultural importance of Petrarch’s life and work to all viewers.

If Boccaccio praises Brossano’s intentions to build a tomb in order to defend and draw attention to his own poetics and cultural politics, he nevertheless seeks to dissuade him from going through with it by asking him to consider an example from the past: “But let me recall one thing to your memory. Famous men lie more honorably in an unknown tomb than in a less distinguished one, if it is known; and so that you should see this, reflect on what Fortune did with Pompey the Great.” ^{Footnote 83} Boccaccio is recalling to Brossano’s memory a story he had written about in the De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (On the misfortunes of famous men). It was well known: a eunuch betrayed the Roman leader, had him beheaded, and threw his body into the sea. Pompey ends up being burned on a funeral pyre and buried with only a single man to honor him, but the rumor of his burial along the coast of Egypt transforms the entire coastline along the delta of the Nile into his tomb. Boccaccio had told the story in the De Casibus to show how Fortune had made up for her poor treatment of the great man at the end of his life. He concluded it, however, with the notion that had Pompey died earlier in Rome, he would have received all of the funerary pomp due to a hero. ^{Footnote 84} In the letter, Boccaccio tells essentially the same story of his burial, but modifies the conditional conclusion by comparing Pompey’s potential funerary honor in Rome to that of King Mausolus made by Artemisia: “But if it had befallen him to die among his own people, considering the preeminence of the things he had done, I hardly believe that the famous tomb that Artemisia, queen of the Carii, once had constructed for her husband, King Mausolus, in Halicarnassus, would have been enough.” ^{Footnote 85} It is peculiar that Boccaccio brings up the story of Artemisia here in place of the ending from the De Casibus. There are two motivations behind his choice that result in two different interpretations of Boccaccio’s example within separate political contexts.

First, Petrarch himself had already combined these two stories in the final dialogue of the De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (On the remedies for both kinds of fortune). ^{Footnote 86} In the dialogue between Sadness and Reason concerning the dying man who is afraid of going unburied, Reason mentions the story of Pompey as evidence that burial does not bring happiness to the dead. Neither Crassus, whose life ended in ignominy, she says, nor Caesar, who was granted a great tomb in Rome, were any happier or sadder than Pompey. Reason concludes that “if a tomb could make one happy, no one could possibly be happier than Mausolus.” ^{Footnote 87} By recalling these stories to Brossano’s memory, Boccaccio is advising him to cast aside his idea of building a tomb for Petrarch in Arquà by using Petrarch’s own arguments against tomb building. Petrarch’s desire that his body lie in a humble grave was the ultimate act of self-fashioning that would ensure the continuity of his persona after death.

The second reason that Boccaccio would combine these two stories concerns the nature of the tomb that Artemisia built for her husband. The story about the construction of the mausoleum was also a part of Boccaccio’s own repertoire—in the chapter on Artemisia in the De Mulieribus Claris (On famous women), which refers to two entombments of Mausolus. Artemisia first ingests the ashes of her husband because she “thought there was no receptacle more suitable for so beloved a spouse than that breast wherein the flames of her old love burned—still more brightly now that Mausolus was gone.” ^{Footnote 88} Only in a second moment does she begin construction of the mausoleum, which is completed after her death. The result of both monuments, in Boccaccio’s story, was to immortalize not the man within it, but rather the love that caused it to be built: “Thus the conjugal love of Artemisia gained renown, and even more so her perseverance in widowhood and mourning. No less famous was the marvelous sepulcher, whether you prefer the carved version or Artemisia’s own breast, wherein rested her husband’s ashes which she had drunk.” ^{Footnote 89} In what seems like a response to the representation of Florence in the Pietosa fonte, the analogy that Boccaccio draws between Pompey, Mausolus, and Petrarch serves rhetorically to cast Florence as Petrarch’s rightfully mourning widow. Like Artemisia, Florence became enflamed with love especially after Petrarch’s death. Furthermore, throughout the letter, despite his concern with Petrarch’s burial place, Boccaccio constantly refers to Petrarch’s remains in terms of his ashes. He only once mentions Petrarch’s corpus, or body—a word he otherwise uses in the letter when speaking of himself.

As with the earlier description of the function of a tomb’s decoration as defined by the public that views it, Boccaccio is showing that the place of a tomb determines how it should be construed. In terms of his project in Florence, then, Boccaccio suggests that the proper tomb for Petrarch could only have been built in Florence, “among his own people,” as an expression of his ancestral city’s love. In its place, Boccaccio suggests, Florence—as Petrarch’s widow—may follow Artemisia’s model by internalizing the monument of its love for Petrarch. To Brossano, however, the story would have signaled the idea that an unknown tomb would be more appropriate to a great man buried outside his own patria, in accord with Petrarch’s own sentiment that tombs have no impact upon the dead and can only affect the living. ^{Footnote 90} With Arquà as Petrarch’s final resting place, then, it would be better for Brossano to build no tomb at all. Perhaps this is what Boccaccio would like Brossano to consider when he concludes this portion of the letter with the injunction: “Therefore, before you begin, think about what you are about to do.” ^{Footnote 91}

In conclusion to the letter, Boccaccio turns to the legacy represented by Petrarch’s works, in a sort of postscript added on in a seemingly casual manner to the body of the letter. ^{Footnote 92} Boccaccio fears that Petrarch’s legacy has fallen into the hands of incapable men, who will determine whether or not to distribute his works, and most importantly, whether or not to burn the Africa: “I hear that the evaluation and review of both [the Africa] and his remaining works has been entrusted to certain men, I know not by whom, and that those works that they deem worthy will be kept.” ^{Footnote 93} These men, whom Boccaccio calls iuristes, or lawyers, ^{Footnote 94} likely include those named in the Pietosa fonte as individuals involved in the controversy over Petrarch’s tomb: Francesco “Checco” di Pietro da Lion, Guasparo Scuaro de’ Broaspini da Verona, and Lombardo della Seta, Petrarch’s devotee and scribe, who was charged with the care of his works after his death. ^{Footnote 95} While Zenoni is concerned solely with the fate of Petrarch’s body, Boccaccio transforms his grief over the loss of Petrarch and his envy of Arquà into more pressing cultural interests.

In another composition, the Versus ad Affricam (Verses addressed to the Africa), sent to Padua around the same time as, if not along with, the letter to Brossano, Boccaccio gives voice to these concerns, focusing on the safekeeping of Petrarch’s incomplete Latin epic poem. He again figures Florence as Petrarch’s widow, beseeching the Africa to return home to its mother. The city’s familial connection to Petrarch—a sentiment parodied by the personified Florence’s grief in the Pietosa fonte—is applied to his poem. Afraid that Petrarch’s followers in Padua would burn the Africa before it became known, Boccaccio expresses his contempt for the assessors of Petrarch’s testament, never mentioning Padua or Arquà by name, only alluding to the area as the epic’s prison and as a place of danger. ^{Footnote 96} Boccaccio adds that Paris, Rome, and Bologna all call out, demanding that the poem be saved. ^{Footnote 97} If Zenoni had been worried that other cities would demand Petrarch’s body, for Boccaccio, various cities “desire that [the Africa] will want to stay safely with them”—a desire that Boccaccio presents as evidence that the poem should not be burned. ^{Footnote 98} He goes on to claim that they cannot vie with the offer from “mother Florence,” since “no other land in Italy is more famous nor is her power equaled by any other. For this she will provide the riches, souls, and weapons of her men.” ^{Footnote 99} Boccaccio wants to save the Africa from oblivion, but he also asserts the legitimacy of Florence’s claim over all others.

His hope for the Africa to find safe haven in Florence, however, is not just another example of provincial quarreling over the material that will form Petrarch’s legacy. Rather, in a series of lines that evoke the passage from his letter to Brossano about the peoples who will visit Petrarch’s tomb, Boccaccio singles out the importance of Florence within a larger European geopolitical landscape: “Once you are safe, every glory of the homeland will rise again. It will set aside its bleak squalor, place on its head the Etruscan crown, and wear again the vestments of royal purple. All together it will rush to meet you from behind and will receive its niece in close embraces. . . . Open and reveal the sacred poem to your family. I beg you to do it: reveal your secrets so that all Italians, young and old, Spaniard and Gaul, and Briton late to his studies, the fierce German, the Hyster, the old Liburnians, and whatever peoples reside under the cold star may see.” ^{Footnote 100} These lines from the Versus ad Affricam cast light on how Boccaccio’s promotion of Petrarch’s works in Florence would perform the same function of the tomb he describes to Brossano in the letter. Boccaccio’s intervention into Paduan politics, with his advice about Petrarch’s tomb, thus also serves the purpose of retrieving the most important material remains of Petrarch’s legacy. He sees Petrarch’s works as having a significant value in the present and future, beyond the provincial civic contest to which the reactions to Petrarch’s death bear witness, as he mentions in the letter: “For much advantage and utility would be stolen from both the present and the future talents of the Italians, if all of his volumes should be less carefully entrusted to the judgment of the ignorant or the hands of the envious.” ^{Footnote 101} The group in Padua, he fears, will not do justice to the legacy of Petrarch by keeping his works trapped there or, worse, by destroying them. Florence, he feels, will be able to provide the resources for their diffusion across Italy and Europe.

Just before the final salutation, Boccaccio returns to the subject of himself and his privileged relationship with Petrarch. He adds that he would like Brossano to send him copies of two of the last letters written to him by Petrarch, including the Latin translation of the final tale of the Decameron, collected as letters 2 and 3 of book 17 of the Rerum Senilium Libri (Letters of old age). Within the context of the rest of the letter Boccaccio’s seemingly casual request subtly indicates that one of Petrarch’s final acts was of willing and generous participation in Boccaccio’s cultural project, in which he engages by “[honoring] the last of [Boccaccio’s] stories with his writing” and by trying to send it to him in Florence. ^{Footnote 102} The letters, about which he learned from Luigi Marsili, were lost along the way because of the “laziness of those carrying them” and “at the hands of those who supervise the presentation of letters, who often shamefully steal them and unjustly take jurisdiction over them.” ^{Footnote 103} Boccaccio here signals to Brossano the fragility of the cultural heritage that he would save and propagate in Florence—a heritage that brought together Petrarch’s works not only with those of Dante, but also with those of Boccaccio himself.

With his letter to Francescuolo da Brossano, Boccaccio continues his singular efforts across his career to bring together the diverse strands of classical and vernacular literature and culture, which he saw as meriting serious attention and study in works such as the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri (Genealogy of the pagan gods). Although Boccaccio developed this position in contrast to Petrarch’s arguments about the superiority of a noble Latin culture over a more popular vernacular poetics and cultural politics, he nevertheless saw Petrarch’s project as a principal part of his own—just as important as the poetry of Dante. While Boccaccio’s carefully constructed letter intervenes in pressing matters of immediate political and cultural significance in Padua and Florence, it theorizes an engagement with Petrarch’s legacy that goes beyond municipal and provincial politics. His concern for Petrarch’s works should be seen in this light, as a gesture toward a much larger cosmopolitan cultural project anchored in Florence.

Beyond Provincialism: The Cultural Politics of Place

The cult of personality that Petrarch generated during his lifetime was cosmopolitan, inasmuch as it superseded political affiliations and locations. Yet it was also paradoxically localized and provincial, insofar as it was centered around the person and presence of Petrarch in the courts by which he was supported throughout his life. Petrarch understood that in order to have any impact on the world beyond his person, he needed to situate his presence in a specific place that offered him such an opportunity. After his death, his friends and patrons feared that there would be no one to fill his important roles as a statesman, philosopher, scholar, and poet. Their works in lament of his death and praise of his life seek to lay claim to his legacy. For Arquà (renamed Arquà Petrarca in 1870), Petrarch’s tomb ensured that the village would not fall into utter oblivion, while for Padua more generally, Petrarch’s body was an additional material marker of the local humanistic tradition that went back to Lovato Lovati (1241–1309) and Albertino Mussato (1261–1329). For his followers in Florence, the repatriation of Petrarch’s dead body meant the last opportunity to redeem the city’s treatment of him in life and to wash away the bitter memory of its refusal of Dante.

For Boccaccio, however, closing the gap between Florence and Petrarch was more than a question of returning Petrarch’s physical presence to his ancestral city as expiation for the sin of Dante’s exile. Rather, he envisioned Florence as the epicenter of a cultural movement that would set Petrarchan Latinity alongside Dantean vernacularism; create a new canon of Florentine lyric poetry that included verses by Petrarch, Dante, and others; ^{Footnote 104} and foster learning across multiple disciplines. ^{Footnote 105} The repetition of the word patria across all of the works considered above, used to denote either the specific physical location to which Petrarch belonged or the spiritual world beyond the body, takes on a more complex meaning in Boccaccio’s letter. For Boccaccio, once Petrarch was no longer a bodily presence, he belonged to the entire world and to Italy especially, thanks to the broad reach of his fame; but his conceptual and material legacy needed to be properly placed in the world in order to have a lasting cultural impact. As Petrarch himself was in life, his legacy had to be simultaneously grounded and cosmopolitan.

Although the political tensions that emerged with Petrarch’s death ceased to be immediately relevant within a few years, ^{Footnote 106} Boccaccio’s last letter shows an ideology that surpasses the culturally limited and provincial concerns of his contemporaries, even as it responds to the realities of the moment. Above all, it is a demonstration of how he theorized the European cultural politics necessary for the reception and popularization of Petrarch’s works alongside those of Dante and his own. In the way that it brings together Latin and vernacular in a unified, local cultural project that reaches out to the world, Boccaccio’s last letter is the capstone of the vision that unifies his career.

Despite everything that Petrarch did to distance himself from Florence, Boccaccio, in the end, succeeded in planting the seeds there for the continuation of both his humanist and his vernacular poetic legacy. With more clearly defined political exigencies and a more developed sense of Latin style, later generations of Florentine humanists would trace the foundations of their own cultural endeavors to Petrarch, even if they demonstrated a more sober appraisal of his Latin works and a focus on the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Fragments of vernacular matters) as his major poetic contribution. ^{Footnote 107} The new context required a freshly fashioned civic engagement with the ghosts of both Petrarch and Dante, especially on the part of the generation of Leonardo Bruni and Giannozzo Manetti, whose casual dismissal of Boccaccio served to differentiate their own projects from one that was all too similar to it in motivation. ^{Footnote 108} Although products of different cultural and political worlds, the foundations of later Florentine recuperations of Petrarch alongside Dante were laid in the fourteenth century, in large part by Boccaccio.