L’esperienza delle cose: la riflessione di Petrarca sul potere di Fortuna

(The Experience of Things: Petrarch’s Reflection on the Power of Fortune)

Abstract

The essay retraces some moments of Petrarch’s reflection on Fortune as it can be found in the collection of his family letters (the Familiares). In them, we observe a substantial change of perspective at the time of the events that struck the poet, and with him Italy and Europe, in the years 1348-49 (namely, the end of the dream of a restoration of Rome by Cola di Rienzo and the plague). In the first books of the Familiares, Petrarch proposes himself as a moral philosopher nourished with examples from the classics and therefore capable of contrasting Fortune’s strikes. The experientia of death in those tragic years however undermines his strength and affects the possibility of preventing suffering to the point of leading Petrarch to rethink deeply his faith in spes (hope) as a projection of the human thought and will into the future.