“Clear, fresh and sweet waters”, homage to Petrarch

Love has always existed. However, poets invented the words with which to tell, evoke and imagine the feeling of love. They built, with their compositions, the grammar of love, a grammar with which we all express ourselves.

Petrarch was certainly among the greatest singers of the feeling of love. «Francesco Petrarca has given the awareness of love to the feeling of love» writes Daniele Aristarco not by chance in the volume “Chiare, fresco et sweet waters” (Einaudi Ragazzi, 2024, euro 16, pp. 48), a new and passionate rereading of Petrarch's Canzoniere, a beacon of inspiration and reflection also for today's authors and readers, especially those under 18 who usually only have to deal with this great medieval poet at school.

A volume, this "Clear, fresh and sweet waters", in which the text, narrated in the first person by Petrarca, dialogues with the evocative and poetic tables of the artist Glenda Sburelin and is an invitation to rediscover the most beautiful sparse rhymes of the great poet, retracing his life and his works and embracing the transformative power of poetry. That poetry which, as Aldo Palazzeschi said «for the poet is the essence of life, for others the perfume, a perfume that everyone perceives vaguely and elusively. The poet has the ability to capture the fleeting moment with an image or in words and to be able to communicate it to others."

And very few in the history of literature have communicated in verse with the mastery of Petrarch. He did it with a perfect language to express the most important of human feelings. In the Canzoniere he thus managed to synthesize and bring to perfection in a single work all the classical and vulgar poetic elaboration on love. In particular, it offered a model of psychological analysis of the human being dealing with the different emotions and reflections of the love relationship, making use of a clear and harmonious language. The author of the Canzoniere was therefore a fine psychologist when the word psychology did not yet exist. He had a profound knowledge of the human soul and knew how to describe its contradictions like few others. As Daniele Aristarco writes again: «His honest, sometimes ferocious, analysis of the feeling of love teaches us to look at ourselves, not to hide contradictions, to reflect on our thoughts and behaviors. He taught us to recognize and cultivate that love that demands nothing more than to be sung. And it ignited in us an inexhaustible need for poetry." Of Petrarch-style poetry, made up of verses animated by passions, feelings, contradictions, all elements that bring the great poet closer to the sensitivity and problems of modernity.