May 12, 2004

Columbian College Celebrates Petrarch’s Message to Posterity

Noted medieval Italian literature scholar Giuseppe Velli visited GW to deliver a lecture in honor of the 700th anniversary of the birth of Italian poet Francesco Petrarch, April 22.

The address, “Petrarch’s Message to Posterity,” was sponsored by GW’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences in collaboration with The Istituto Italiano di Cultura.

“Why remember an intellectual and a poet who lived 700 years ago?” asked Velli, a professor at The University of Milan, one of the best known scholars of Medieval Italian literature in the world and a member of the Italian National Council for the VII Centennial Celebrations of Francesco Petrarch birth.

His short answer was because so much “of the feelings and desires expressed by Petrarch still belong to us today.”

The 14th-century scholar and poet, initially studied law, but later became an influential leader in the Italian Renaissance. His most famous works centered on his love for “Laura,” an idealized beloved whom he met in 1327 and who died in 1348.

According to Velli, Petrarch says many times he’s not writing for his time, he’s writing for generations to come. He looks at his life from a far-away perspective.

“Petrarch was one of the first to have the feeling that the past is far away,” said Velli. “In order to enrich ourselves we have to uncover the face of antiquity.”

In this sense Petrarch looks back to the writers of the past, from Ovid to Horace to Virgil whom he sees as contemporaries.

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