Abstract

Judging from what we read in its proem, the ‘Secretum meum’ was for Petrarch a kind of intimate diary not intended for publication. It also appears that it was never completed, lingering for many years among his unpublished papers and drafts. Yet today it is hard to believe that that is how things really were, not least because of the rather extensive manuscript tradition of the work, which reached every corner of Europe (more than one hundred copies of various origins and dates are preserved). This article aims to reconstruct this history, starting from the earliest documentary evidence – the letters of some friends, a mention in a commemorative text composed a few weeks after his death – and continuing to the beginning of the Modern period.