Abstract
Is it inborn in us or produced by some trick that when we see the places in which we have heard that famous men performed great deeds, we are more moved than by hearing or reading their exploits?” [Naturane nobis hoc, inquit, datum dicam an errore quodam, ut, cum ea loca videamus, in quipus memoria dignos viros acceperimus multum esse versatos, magis moveamur, quam si quando forum ipsorum aut facta audiamus aut scriptum aliquod legamus?] (V.i.2). The question, posed by Marcus Piso to his friends as they stroll through the Athenian landscape of the Academy in book V of Cicero’s De finibus, would acquire new relevance fourteen hundred years later during a visit that Petrarch made to Rome. As he walked through the ancient Forum (a wilderness of ruins covered by grazing sheep and overgrown vegetation), Petrarch felt so “overwhelmed by . . . the wonder of so many things and by the greatness of (his) astonishment” [miraculo rerum tantarum et stuporis mole obrutus] (Familiares II.14), that he could not find the words to describe what he saw in the old caput mundi to his friend Giovanni Colonna. A few years later, during a visit to Mantua, the birth place of his beloved Virgil, Petrarch would experience again the same site-induced transport he felt in Rome.1 The record of this visit is in a letter addressed to the Roman poet in which Petrarch searches through the Mantuan landscape for traces of the presence of Virgil:
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