«Valete amici, valete epistole»: l’ultimo libro delle Senili

It is generally assumed that Petrarch planned to put at the end of the Seniles the Epistola ad Posteritatem, thereby creating a symmetry with the last Book of the Familiares, which was made up of letters to great men of the past. The paper aims to prove that towards the end of his life Petrarch abandoned this project: sensing that, in his frail health, death was imminent, he judged that the Book XVII - all of letters to Boccaccio, with the long and substantial Sen. XVII 2, which is his spiritual testament, and XVII 3, the famous translation of the last tale in the Decameron - was especially apt to conclude the collection. So, scarcely more than a month before his death, he wrote the last letter of all, Sen. XVII 4, ending with a definitive farewell to friends and letters. The outcome is that it is not correct to print - as recent editors have done - the unfinished letter Ad Posteritatem as Book XVIII of the Seniles. The paper also argues that Sen. XVII 3 alone among the four letters of Book XVII has a precanonical tradition, which descends not from the missiva but from the scriptorium of the author himself. The study of the tradition makes it possible to demonstrate that a difficult passage of Sen. XVII 4, concerning the question of whether the tale of Griselda be history or fable, was never correctly printed, and that the restitution of the wording with appropriate punctuation brings the passage into line with others where Petrarch considers the same problem. The paper also deals with question about Petrarch and the Decameron: how and when he had a copy of it and whether it was ever talked of between the two friends.