"L'inventore del tempo". Petrarca e i poeti del modernismo italiano

The essay analyses how Petrarch’s works influenced the Italian modernist poetry of the early twentieth-century. Following onfrom the deep divide which traditionally contrasts Dante’s currents of influence on the Italian literature with Petrarch’s heritage, the essay first of all considers the multifaceted relationships between Petrarchism and modernist poets such as Gozzano, Saba, Montale. It then focuses on the pivotal influence Petrarch exterted on Ungaretti’s idea of poetry. Ungaretti recognized Petrarch as the writer who invented modern poetry by discovering the distinctive temporality of the lyric word, which searchs for her lost object or her hidden sense between memory and oblivion, that is between symbolism and allegory, according to their modernist contamination.