“Solo et pensoso” in the Latin poetry of the Italian Fifteenth Century

Abstract

The reception of Petrarch's Rvf seems to have been very extensive even in the so-called "century without poetry" (Croce 209-238), above all in humanist Latin literature which wisely mixes the topoi of classical elegy with the ones of Romance poetry. The recent studies by Pantani, Landi and Tonelli have only opened the way towards a field which could be really interesting to explore. In particular, "Solo et pensoso" seems to have enjoyed a great fortune: even if it has not been translated by humanists (as on the contrary has happened with other poems from the Rvf) it has a revival in the neo-Latin poetry of humanists, both in evident rewritings, such as those by Strozzi and Landino, and in the echoes, the allusions, and even the parodical overturnings that can be found in Folengo. However, after careful scrutiny we can realise that humanists did not absorb the melancholic elements which make this poem closer to our modern sensibility. They just extracted some tesserae (above all the promenade through the natural elements) to insert in an amatory context which sometimes shows traits of classical sufferance, sometimes of stilnovistic hope. Scholars trained in classics often have been, and still are today, called upon to edit critical editions of humanist poets. Such scholars often miss, due to professional bias,