The Bittersweet Life of a Solitary Man

This article examines the functions and modalities in which eating habits and metaphors appear in the works and notes of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74). Food is employed as a lens to illuminate how this poet chose to live and to represent the world, faith, life and its enjoyment. Petrarch’s poetic approach to the food world reveals his judgments and feelings about life, which both come from the ethical and moral impositions, beliefs and attitudes of late medieval society. This aspect of Petrarch’s work unveils an unobserved facet of his personality that represents him as a careful consumer, a judicious producer and procurer of his own sustenance, a lover of the most fertile landscapes and a keen agriculturalist. The meticulous attention paid to his diet in the construction of his auto-ethnography dissolves the boundaries between frugality and opulence, revealing a growing interest in being human. This provides a pivotal, pioneering insight into the subsequent eras of Humanism and the Renaissance.