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Dante's Shadow in Petrarch's Canzoniere

Princeton University professor Simone Marchesi will give a lecture on how Dante appears in Petrarch's most famous work, The Canzoniere this Thursday, March 22, 2012 starting at 6:00 pm at Reiss Science Building 112 on the campus of Georgetown University. This event is open to the public.

Born in Arezzo, as he writes, in the days in which the exiled Dante was passing through that city, and devoting a significant portion of his intellectual energy to writing lyrical poetry in the vernacular, Petrarch felt (as he had throughout his life) the need to address a fundamental question: how not to be Dante. Petrarch's describes his non-Dantean treatment of time and space in his collection of lyric poetry. Simone Marchesi is Associate Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University. His main research area is the dialogue with classical and late-antique texts engaged by Italian medieval writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Most recently, he has edited and translated into Italian Robert Hollander's full commentary to Dante's Commedia (Olschki, 2011).