Per umbram fons ruit. Petrarca in Elicona. Paesaggio e Umanesimo

This article, forming part of broader research into landscape in the literature of Petrarch, analyses the personal experience of the poet and his conception of the landscape of solitude, as well as the role that this has played both in the writer’s literary creation and in the construction of the ideal figure of the humanist intellectual, later to be of such influence. The author proposes a reading of the iconographic elements of the autographic design contained within Pliny’s Historia naturalis, behind which there lies not only the poet’s name but also his humanistic mythography.