Emotional ambivalence across times and spaces : mapping Petrarch’s intersecting worlds

Petrarch stands at the top of Mount Ventoux and proclaims his longing to return home. His soul turns toward Italy. Yet Petrarch has no “home” as such, and Italy does not exist except as a post-imperial territorial designation. There certainly is no Italian nation. How can we understand these paradoxes? How does Petrarch’s passion relate to the question of nation formation? Through an exploration of Petrarch’s emotional responses to Italy, and by tracking his variable senses of space and time, this essay explores the tensions expressed by a deracinated intellectual caught between two different but contemporaneous ontological formations: the traditional and the modern. Here, the concept of “the traditional” is not treated as being the same as “the pre-modern.” Rather the essay works with a post-binary method of ontological valences or orientations. The colliding valence s of Petrarch’s evocations are used to illustrate the ways we can open up alternative lines of inquiry into a crucial period in the life of Italy. The essay seeks an alternative to the mainstream tendency to either to make contentious overstatements or to slide into overcautious interpretative ambiguity.