ABSTRACT
Petrarch is the European scholar who saw Ulysses as the double of Dante, as a hero in the pursuit of knowledge, but without the grace of God. In the poem of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Petrarch takes up the familiar classical legend of the Antipodes, and adapts it to his own personal situation — that of the lonely anguished poet, confronted with the fall of night and longing for the return of day. The dualism can be identified in the contrast between Petrarch the Petrarchist, and Petrarch minus Petrarchism. The choice of Petrarch, rather than Dante, as a model, implies the choice of a particular Weltanschauung, whether in the formal and repetitive Petrarchism of out-and-out imitators, or in the case of the 'genuinely-felt' Petrarchism of poets such as Poliziano, Tasso, Alfieri, Foscolo, and eventually Leopardi. The chapter describes fundamental polarity between the respective roles of Petrarch and Dante in the history of Italian literature.
