Jean de Tournes printed this lovely pocket edition of the Sonnets, the Canzone, and the Triumphs in Lyons. The text may be Italian in language but, from its title-page depiction of Petrarch and Laura within the frame of a lover's heart, through the double set of woodcuts (displayed here) that open the Triumph of Love, to the delicacy of its small size , the book is decidedly French in appearance and feel.
In contrast, Petrarch's sentiments layed far from France. One of his four invectives is hurled against "A Detractor of Italy" (Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italie); in it, Gallia, Roman France, is the frequent target of the Poet's verbal missiles. It was inconceivable for Petrarch that the Papacy be anywhere but Rome, and the Holy See "held captive" in Avignon. The following sonnet, presented here in translation, summarizes in full his disdain for the Avignon Papacy with a critical vehemence that, for later generations, bordered all too dangerously on heresy.
Sonnet, RVF 138
"Fontana di dolor, albergo d'ira"
Font of sorrow and inn of wrath,
school of error, and temple of heresy,
once Rome, now Babylon of perfidy,
the source of our many tears and sighs.
O forge of deceipt, oh dire prison,
where goodness dies, and evil's bred and nursed;
of the living a hell, and a miracle indeed
should Christ's own ire not finally wax against you.
Founded in chaste and humble poverty,
you raise your horns now, shameless whore,
against your founders? Where lies your hope?
within your wantonness? In your ill-born wealth?
Thus Constantine shall not return; may he be wrenched
from this wicked world that bears him.
