ABSTRACT
In the early 1340s, when his reputation as an intellectual and poet started to gain him ever wider acclaim all over Europe, Francis Petrarch engaged in an ambitious project to actively reinvent several of the traditions aimed at honouring and remembering literary men, both the living and the dead ones, rituals he had read about in the works of his cherished Roman predecessors. When on a diplomatic mission to Naples at the end of 1343, together with two friends he undertook an excursion to those sites on the northern part of the cities bay—to Baia, the lakes of Averno and Lucrino, to Cuma and Pozzuoli—that stimulated memories of Virgil and his works, relating this experience of a literary pilgrimage in a letter to his close friend Giovanni Colonna. 1 This unusual initiative to visit places associated with poets he admired was a follow-up to the events of some two years earlier, when on Easter Sunday 1341 Petrarch himself had been crowned a poet laureate, after having been cross-examined for three days by the king of Naples, Robert of Anjou. Actively engaged as he was in the re-invention and re-enactment of this ancient ritual and in publicizing it through his extensive network of correspondents, Petrarch succeeded in both reanimating literary memorial practices long neglected and in inscribing himself into this newly polished tradition to publicly honour literary accomplishments.
