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  • Archaeology of the Tre Corone:Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio in Benvenuto da Imola's Commentary on the Divine Comedy
  • Luca Fiorentini

One of the oldest documents—maybe the oldest—in which the names of Petrarch and Boccaccio are explicitly associated with Dante's is a commentary on the Divine Comedy written by a Neapolitan interpreter who lived in the fourteenth century: Guglielmo Maramauro.

Most likely born in 1318, Maramauro was a member of the Neapolitan aristocracy. In the first part of his life, he worked as a functionary for the Angevin Monarchy; thanks to this position, he was able to travel throughout Italy and also visit foreign countries including Germany, Hungary, Crete, and England. In the last years of his life, he worked at the University (Studium) of Naples, where he taught courses on Thomas Aquinas's oeuvre. Maramauro was still teaching at the University of Naples when he died. We do not know the exact date of his death, but it was probably between 1379 and 1383.1

Roughly ten years earlier, in 1369, Maramauro began his most important work, the Expositione sopra l'«Inferno» di Dante Alligieri, which he completed between 1373 and 1374. In the prologue to his commentary on Dante's Inferno, Maramauro first provides concise information concerning the structure of the poem and discusses the origin of his own hermeneutical activity, quoting from the previous commentaries on Dante's Comedy that helped him write his own. Then he mentions some [End Page 1] figures who, he says, helped him to complete the "difficult task"—"la dura impresa"—that is, the commentary on Dante's poem:

E tanto con l'aiuto de questi exposituri, quanto con l'aiuto de misser Gioan Bocacio e de misser Francesco Petrarca [. . .] io me mossi a volere prendere questa dura impresa.2

Here Maramauro asserts that Boccaccio and Petrarch helped him to interpret Dante: "I began this difficult task with the help of Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca." The question is how we should understand this assertion.

It is highly unlikely that Petrarch volunteered himself to provide expertise on Dante's poem. Obviously he would have been able to do it, but it is well known that Petrarch expressed an aversion to Dante, declaring that he had never studied Dante's poem—"nunquam librum illius habuerim" ("I have never possessed his book"), to quote the famous epistle Fam. 21.15, addressed to Boccaccio in 1359.3 Nevertheless, Petrarch and Maramauro surely knew each other. Petrarch sent two letters to Maramauro, the epistles Sen. 11.5 and 15.4, in which he seems to display love and affection for his correspondent (especially in Sen. 15.4).

Concerning Boccaccio, we know that Maramauro had quite a close relationship with him. Above all, it is highly probable that Maramauro attended the Lectura Dantis given by Boccaccio between 1373 and 1374 in Florence, in the church of Santo Stefano in Badia; this is demonstrated by the fact that in Maramauro's commentary we can find many points of contact with Boccaccio's exposition on the Divine Comedy. Since Maramauro could not have had access to the written draft of Boccaccio's commentary, which was published many years after Maramauro's death, these textual contacts in all likelihood derived from the notes he took during Boccaccio's course.4

A thorough investigation of the citations from Petrarch and Boccaccio in Maramauro's commentary on Dante has never been attempted. It is thus possible that, when Maramauro writes that Petrarch and Boccaccio helped him in interpreting Dante, he actually means that he used Petrarch and Boccaccio's works as instruments for the interpretation of Dante's Comedy. At this stage of the research, however, we must take as our starting point this fact: just a few decades after Dante's death, Maramauro mentioned Petrarch and Boccaccio as the most important authors [End Page 2] to consult in order to read and understand Dante correctly. For the very first time—at least in an explicit way—Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are mentioned in the same sentence. Maramauro's commentary therefore offers one of the first testimonies of a process that would culminate a few decades later in the...

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