Pomilio, Petrarca e l'humanitas

[Machine translation] A student of the Normale of Pisa, where he graduated with a thesis on Pirandello, Mario Pomilio was a scholarship holder in Brussels and Paris, where between 1950 and 1952 he dedicated himself to ambitious research on the aesthetics of furor and on the divine nature of poetic inspiration from the Middle Ages to the modern age. Within this vast project, a study on Petrarca was born, large and solid even if not completely refined, which in 2016 was published by me starting from the autograph, kept at the Manuscript Center of the University of Pavia, and from a copy of it prepared by Dora Pomilio, the writer's wife. The Petrarchist essay is surprising for the originality and foresight with which the thirty-year-old author explores the aesthetics of a writer-thinker: in Latin works Petrarca creates an original synthesis of classical and Christian values, reconciling Cicero with Lactantius; arguing with Thomist scientism and monastic culture, which attributed an ancillary function to letters, proclaims the ethical dignity and speculative power of poetry, ushering in the bright season of Christian humanism at an early stage; poetry, previously reductively understood as a rhetorical ornamentation, it becomes a privileged tool for revealing the truth and accessing superior wisdom. The essay remained unpublished, but the reflection on Petrarchist aesthetics, and more generally on the meaning of literature, was decisive in Pomilio's “conversion”: it was also by virtue of this experience that he recognized his vocation, being born to himself as a writer without ever giving up the habit of the scholar and the thinker.