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Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentators were not the first readers to detect links between amor and patria in Petrarch’s poetry. His premier contemporary disciple, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313‒74), wrote a collection of sonnets whose amatory focus, like Petrarch’s, incorporates social, cultural, political , and historical criticism.1 It recounts the poet’s love for the Neapolitan “Fiammetta” during his youth in Naples (1327‒40/41), years that overlap with Petrarch’s earliest vernacular poems and indicate the latter’s astonishingly prompt reception in the Angevin court. Shortly after Boccaccio’s departure in late 1340 or early 1341, Petrarch visited Naples to receive King Robert’s sponsorship for his coronation at Rome. Two and a half years later, in November 1343, Petrarch returned to Naples and lamented that after Robert’s death the preceding January the kingdom showed “no piety, no truth, no faith” and all signs of collapse (Fam. 5.3: 234‒25/435‒36), a judgment already registered in Boccaccio’s Rime.2 Petrarch found Naples so depraved that it no longer shared the Italian ethos that he identified with Rome, Parma, Padua, and Verona. This experience set the stage for his eventual loss of faith in a pan-Italian order . Boccaccio registers a similar disappointment in his Rime, in which the beloved’s betrayal saps the speaker’s self-assurance and leads to a crisis of confidence in the values of his patria. As a result of his disillusionment, Boccaccio renounced his Rime and burned his manuscript in 1364, allowing the survival of some 126 poems already in random circulation.3 The result is a more scattered collection than Petrarch ’s, with a concentration of amatory poems in its first half and many de54 Amor and Patria Citing Petrarch in Florence and Naples 3 votional and occasional poems in its second half. Its implied narrative offers a highly romanticized account of the poet’s experience in Naples, when, as an apprentice of his father, an associate of the Bardi banking company who managed King Robert’s financial affairs, he enjoyed some access to the FrancoAngevin court. Disaffected with his father’s bourgeois career and with alternative plans to study law, he devoted himself to poetry and to the love of Fiammetta, whose name bears the emblem of Maria d’Aquino, an illegitimate daughter of the king.4 In Filocolo 5.8 (1336‒38) Boccaccio had invented for himself a mythic ancestry of royal birth to erase his illegitimacy. Through his unknown mother he claimed to descend from the kings of France and ultimately from Francus through Hector to Dardanus, from whom Fiammetta also descends.5 In this version of Freud’s “family romance” the poet’s painful but necessary liberation from his parents signals a traumatic conflict between successive generations upon which “the whole progress of society rests.”6 Boccaccio, dissatisfied with his lot, imagines himself an illegitimate child separated at birth from biological parents of a higher social, cultural, and intellectual standing whose patrimony he intuitively displays. He springs neither from provincial Certaldo nor from the Republic of Florence but from an international aristocracy with roots in ancient Troy. In the Ninfale fiesolano Boccaccio would go on to provide genealogical accounts of his major characters, each of whom claims to have been separated from a putatively noble or royal parent. Parallel to these accounts is a narrative about the origins of Florence (Prose 38). Founded by Atlas, destroyed by barbarians, and restored by Charlemagne, it derives its greatness from a hybrid of Greco-French influence.7 The story of Boccaccio’s Rime likewise tells of social stratification and class conflict, but here its speaker’s effort to take on a new identity invites disaster. His amatory interest leads to failure and frustration when the higher-born beloved rejects him for others of her own standing. Such a narrative dominates early biographies that weigh Boccaccio’s oedipal struggle with his bourgeois father against his aspiration toward a life of poetry and learning. In Giannozzo Manetti’s Life of Boccaccio (1440s) the young man “shrank by nature from financial arts of [his father’s] sort, and he was felt to be more suited to literary studies. . . . Accordingly, when he seemed of an age to be his own master he decided to abandon [legal] studies as well and turn to poetry before all else.”8 Hieronimo Squarzafico’s Life of Boccaccio (appended to an edition of Filocolo printed at Venice in 1467 and reprinted at...

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