On its flyleaf, he inscribed these unforgettable words: “I decided to write down the harsh memory of this painful loss, and I did so, I suppose, with a certain bitter sweetness, in the very place that so often passes before my eyes". Petrarch resolved to use every ounce of his eloquence to make her eternally present in his poetry but also in his Virgil. He began this practice of commemoration by recording the death - from three years earlier, in 1348 - of his beloved Laura, the subject of so many of his poems. Others advised flight and proposed temporary public health measures such as quarantine, but Petrarch seems to have felt that he might think and write his way through this pandemic.Īround 1351, Petrarch began to memorialize those whom he loved and lost by inscribing his recollections of them on the pages of a much-treasured possession - his copy of Virgil’s works adorned with a beautiful frontispiece by the Sienese painter Simone Martini. Life had become cruel and death unrelenting but he compensated by taking pen in hand - the only useful weapon he had besides prayer and the one he preferred. The act of writing, which had initially been impossibly painful, began to elevate his spirits. He wrote a poem commemorating the tragic death of Laura, a woman he had known and loved in southern France, only to discover that the person to which he’d sent the poem, the Tuscan poet Sennuccio del Bene, later died of plague as well, making Petrarch wonder if his words bore the contagion. During the following year, Petrarch continued to enumerate plague victims as well as the cumulative effects of quarantine and depopulation. This was an astute and ultimately accurate observation. At the end of this awful year, Petrarch predicted that anyone who escaped the first assault should prepare for the viciousness of plague’s return.
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