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Of course, he was a poet from whom he pulled poetry to jump to another place, to more proximity, to more modern territories. And of course he was a remarkable man, made to reach the position of notary or lawyer or curial figurehead, destinies from which he knew how to escape. Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) went through the fourteenth century with the mission of creating a new way of writing, of thinking, of diagnosing his time and of interpreting tradition. Petrarch, to put it bluntly, marked a new era in the West (along with Dante and Boccacio). That West of opulence, of contradiction, of disaster, of the first mercantile capitalism, of holy wars between powerful families and ambitious Popes.

In the midst of this burning landscape, Petrarch (son of a Florentine notary) is far from being the placid and dreamy poet, afflicted and suffering, that the laziness of some biographies brought stumbling. Oh well. Petrarch is a rigorous thinker who describes the state of desolation of a world where he sees the stigma of human wickedness as an emblem of decadence. But getting to the bottom of Petrarch's legacy requires you to invest time, delving into the ocean of his prose work takes life. Written in Latin, his legacy totals thousands of letters. The same ones that the publishing house Acantilado, in a Herculean bet, publishes in four volumes -4,285 pages- coordinated by the late Ugo Dotti, translated by Francisco Socas and revised by Jordi Bayod.

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Interview.

Why Harari has become the world's most influential thinker: "10 years ago no one wanted to interview me"

  • Written by: JORGE BENÍTEZ

Why Harari has become the world's most influential thinker: "10 years ago no one wanted to interview me"

Literature.

Michel Houellebecq: "We forgive the rapes committed against Israeli women because of the origin of the rapists"

  • Written by: TAMAR SEBOK / YEDIOTH AHRONOTH (CORRIERE DELLA SERA)

Michel Houellebecq: "We forgive the rapes committed against Israeli women because of the origin of the rapists"

The collection is divided into family letters, not necessarily to family, but also to friends, acquaintances, contemporaries such as Boccaccio, Cardinal Colonna, even classics with whom he maintained fictitious correspondence: Cicero, Virgil, the historian Titus Livius, Horace, Seneca...; then there are the Letters of Senescence, where he displays his wisdom and anticipatory intelligence; the Letters Without Names, many of them also like another game of mirrors with his masters, whom he turns into interlocutors of his concerns, his uncertainties, his contradiction; and the Scattered Letters.

Petrarch's success was an early one. As an attentive citizen and as a poet. Throughout his life he published a collection of poems entitled Triunfos, as well as 317 sonnets, 29 songs, 9 sextines, 7 ballads and 4 madrigals. All this was written in the vernacular (unlike his letters) and collected in his totemic Songbook, which occupied his life from 1335 to the end.

He maintained influence in the papal curia with the Colonna. In 1341, by muddling here and there, he managed to get René of Anjou (King of Naples, Lord of Provence and Rome) to grant him the laurel of poet, a recognition to which Dante aspired in vain. It was on April 8 and in the Roman Capitol, during a lavish and solemn ceremony. This definitely propelled him.

Petrarch attains greater influence and raises his voice against some of the evils of the time that he experiences as symptoms of an unstoppable decadence. It begins, for example, with freedom. In one of his letters, he sounds implacable: "And let no one falsely believe that those who stand guard for liberty, those who assume the defense of the republic hitherto abandoned, act in favor of other people's interests; no, they work for their own." And from there it explodes with a violent condemnation of corruption, and at the same time of misery. Another excerpt from his letters: "Think, please, how many times you have exposed yourselves to the dangers of death by those tyrants so proud and ungrateful, while with the sword you vented not your interests, but theirs..."

Petrarch's civic attitude, his thought, his remarkable leap forward in the knowledge and dissemination of the classics, as well as his defense of Christianity (he never departed from the dominant religious ideology) and at the same time of the pagans, make his adventure an extraordinary mission to give body and meaning to his time. The center of attention of his talent is always the human being and there he could not fail to advance towards a precise transgressive orientation.

The desire for fame and to do things with more drive, more commitment, helps him to forge his intellectual ideal: a knowledge that has its origin in classical culture and that this reaches the hearts and minds of his contemporaries to make them better, morally and intellectually. Their aspiration is to have a place among the younger generations, either by lambasting them or by admonishing them. "The condemnation of the present," explains Ugo Dotti, "is never separated from the renewal of consciences, and this hope constitutes the most remarkable spring of that humanistic age that begins with it."

This man of faith, however, also made an effort to intervene with the aim of bringing about a certain transformation in the excesses of the Church, as many others later attempted, from Antonio de Nebrija to Machiavelli. Petrarch's endeavor was not a neutral undertaking, but a stance against the forbidden, against the forbidden. Hence his position as a moral philosopher, as a rebellious subject, as a distorting element. "He is one who distances himself from the quarrels and follies of men, but does not limit himself to looking out for his own interests: the public, the general state of human society, is made present to him by necessity," Dotti writes. He maintained courageous support for just causes, starting with the battle for the well-being of the underprivileged.

The man who was crowned a poet to the ovation of the patricians, and considered immortal from that moment on, died at the age of 70. It was 1374. He had been preparing for years, in a moderate retirement, for a good death: "And surely it is time: it is not advisable to live to one's fill, it is enough to live until one's fill."

Then, as with the pioneers, it began to look old-fashioned. Erasmus warned: "He is scarcely read." It was a matter of centuries. Now, on time, always on time, come back. And their challenge still makes sense.

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