Abstract

In the odeporic epistle known as ‘Itinerarium breve de Ianua usque ad Ierusalem et Terram Sanctam’ Petrarch outlines a manifesto of the new humanistic, classicist, literary, and Italo-centered culture that he promotes. At the same time, he exploits his personal experience of the Tyrrhenian coasts from Genoa to the Neapolitan region. Examining the work’s strictly geographical content reveals an approach not only focused on the antiquarian aspects but also attentive to precisely decoding the natural, anthropic, morphological, and economic components of the contemporary environmental mosaic. This article particularly aims to investigate the exemplary role played by the Italian topographies of the ‘Comedy’, and Petrarch’s desire to assimilate, transform, and authoritatively overcome Dante’s model in the specific and unprecedented field of geographical literature