ABSTRACT
In the middle of the fourteenth century Petrarch, today best known for his lyric poems in Italian, wrote a Latin epic, Africa, dealing with the struggle between Rome and Carthage, which he believed would be the basis of his fame. It was apparently the poet Guido Cavalcanti, ‘my best friend’, as Dante calls him in the Vita Nuova, who suggested that Dante write in Italian rather than Latin, and these two poets now stand at the head of the vernacular tradition of love poetry later carried forward by Petrarch. The technique of the first three lines of the Divina Commedia give some indication of its poetic power: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitami ritrovai per una selva oscurache la diritta via era smarrita.(In the middle of our life’s road I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way had disappeared.).
