Naples and the Landscape of Virgilian otium in the Carmina Bucolica of Petrarch and Boccaccio

Abstract

This article explains how Virgil’s traditional association with Naples inspired the fourteenth-century humanist poets Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio to set their own Virgilian eclogues in the same city. Petrarch began his Bucolicum Carmen by composing an allegorical eclogue about the death of his patron Robert of Anjou, the King of Naples; and in imitation of this poem, his admiring friend Boccaccio later wrote a series of Neapolitan eclogues depicting the events that followed Robert’s death. As Petrarch and Boccaccio each had different relationships with Naples, it will be shown that the city represents their respective ideals of poetic otium.