ABSTRACT
The words of Giovanni Gherardi have a polemical tone; his apologies are purely rhetorical. The canon constituted by the three great authors of the Italian Middle Ages – Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – is commonly known as the canon of the Tre Corone. A few years after Maramauro, between 1375 and 1383, another interpreter of Dante’s Commedia demonstrates his full awareness of the role that Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio had assumed in the panorama of modern literature; moreover, he reflects on the motives for which these men might be considered the greatest poets of their times. The canon composed of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio is a creation which owes its existence in the first place to Petrarch and Boccaccio themselves.
