





































Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 6.1 (2019) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.6 
 

 

 

 

  
 86 

#LauraSpeaks: Remediations of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s “Risposte” 

Elisa Briante, Marena Lear, and Gerardo Pisacane 

 

Abstract: This paper examines the implications of digital remediation which translates 

and transforms an older text, endowing it with new life, in relation to the project 

#LauraSpeaks, a translation and remediation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Risposte di 

Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca, in nome della medesima. Divided into 

three different sections, it describes the steps involved in this project, from the 

discovery of the original text and the analysis of Bongiovanni’s contribution within the 

realm of Petrarchism, moving to a discussion of the translation of her work from 

Italian to English and the creation of the “Twitterature” version of the text, then finally 

to an analysis of the text’s transformation into the film medium. This paper also 

investigates the theoretical premises of digital remediation and the role that hypertext 

plays in multiplying opportunities for meaning-making and in enriching the act of 

reading and writing. 

Introduction 

Much recent Francesco Petrarca scholarship has focused attention on the idea that the powerful 

vernacular voice of Humanism was not a singular voice, but a plural one. He fashioned and 

refashioned himself and his work throughout the course of his life, and “the inner conflicts, the self-

doubts, the subjection to love, the yearning for earthly glory, and the following penance and regret are 

as much carefully constructed postures in dialogue with a web of other texts and voices as they are 

reflections of the writer's inner, psychological conditions” (Ascoli & Falkeid  1). Petrarca deliberately 

positioned himself as the lynchpin in a network of voices from classical antiquity, from his 

contemporary milieu, and from the future readers he envisioned. This positioning contributed to the 

key role he played in the formation of the European lyric discourse, which was in large part shaped 

by his conception of the act of writing as creation of the self, and thus never fixed or complete. The 

continuous emphasis on the practice of writing that permeates the Canzoniere, and the idea that the 

individual consciousness created through the act of writing “cannot transcend the practice that makes 

them possible” (Lollini “Return” 71) parallels Petrarca’s own obsessive revisions of this work. It is 

this quality of Petrarca’s work that made him an inspiration for the Petrarchist style of writing that 

followed him, as well as an ideal subject for a digital project based on translation and remediation. 

This was the seed for the Oregon Petrarch Open Book (OPOB) project, a digital hypertext which 

“document[s] the multiple, potentially infinite lives of Petrarch’s Canzoniere” (Lollini “Return” 72) 

The methodology behind the OPOB was the basis for our project, the translation and remediation(s) 

of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s collection of poetry, Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer Francesco 

http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  87 

Petrarca, in nome della medesima. This project is both a creative and critical endeavor which highlights 

Bongiovanni’s unique style and contribution to the tradition of Petrarchism by creating the first 

translation of the poems into English, and draws it into the digital sphere through two different 

remediations: Twitter poetry and a short video. Through the connection of this project to the OPOB, 

our work becomes an extension of the database of RVF scholarship and works based on the RVF, 

and thus another iteration of the ‘afterlife’ of this important and influential collection of poetry. 

This paper then addresses the following questions: given the long tradition of Petrarchism, what 

is important about Pellegra Bongiovanni’s particular contribution? And what does it mean to connect 

this work to a larger digital database of RVF scholarship? Following the hermeneutic mode of 

interpretation, the remediations linked together by a hypertext such as the OPOB allows for an 

understanding of the meaning of individual texts to be co-constitutive with other texts and with a 

specific historical context. In a kind of digital poetics of relation, each individual text retains its 

particularity and opacity, but is understood in its relation to other texts. In its position as one star in a 

constellation of Petrarca scholarship, Pellegra Bongiovanni’s poetry does not become merely 

subsumed into the large body of work, rather it becomes one important node within a non-hierarchical 

network of connections which contributes something new to the whole, and in return is fed by those 

connections. By creating remediations of Bongiovanni’s unique work, and connecting them to the 

OPOB, we allow her work to add a fresh perspective to Petrarca scholarship, opening a new 

dimension of interpretation of Petrarca’s work that arises in the conversation between the two authors. 

Translating and transforming the poems into a hypertext format is also a remediation of a different 

kind of ‘hypertext’ that existed in Italian society at the time the poems were written, when it was 

common to share writings among authors, who would draw from and add to one another’s work. In 

addition, given that the poetry itself is an “answering back,” an interrogation of and reaction to 

Petrarca’s poems about Laura in the voice of Laura herself, our remediations of the poems emphasize 

the dynamic and dialogic quality of Bongiovanni’s work. The metanarrative of the video focuses on 

the act of writing as itself relational and dynamic; moreover, it brings into focus the collaborative 

nature of not just writing, but different forms of media (hypermediacy). Given the collaborative nature 

of this project – including that of the three participants but also the digital readership and rewriting 

made possible through hypertextualization – this work embodies Pierre Lévy’s concept of a “collective 

intelligence” which is the symbiosis between personal learning and collective learning, a growing 

ecosystem of ideas. 

1. Voicing Laura: Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Challenge 
Elisa Briante 

 

1.1 Petrarca and Petrarchism in the Digital Era 

Why is Petrarca so important? Why do we still talk about him in 2019, and why can we still identify 

ourselves in his poetry? It is not just for the quality of his literary production. Petrarca tried to create 

a relationship between his readers and himself through the experience of love, the most common and 

yet dehumanizing personal experience. The love tradition on which Petrarca relies talks about a kind 

of love, called amor cortese (courtly love), which tortures the poet with fire, arrows and chains, and 

which is never consummated or even reciprocated. As opposed to the love towards the women 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  88 

described as angels by the poets of the Dolce stil novo, Petrarca’s love for Laura is a more earthly 

love, grounded in images of nature, though in the end of the Canzoniere she is what makes a vision 

of God possible for Petrarca: “Menami al suo Signor. Allor m’inchino,/ Pregando humilemente che 

consenta/ Ch’i’ stia a veder et l’uno et l’altro volto” (Petrarca, OPOB poem 362, Incunabulum). In 

Petrarca’s lyric, the figure of Laura becomes both an incarnation of love and a representation of the 

poet’s desire to reach God.  

But who is Madonna Laura? For many years, she was considered just a fictional and allegorical 

character invented by Petrarca to justify his love towards laurum, the laurel, which represented poetic 

glory. Petrarca himself, in some epistolary exchanges with his friends, often defended the real existence 

of his beloved, but “few seemed to believe that Laura was ever spirans, alive” (Russo 500). Whether 

Laura was a real person or not was considered an important issue by the Petrarchists, as a key to fully 

investigate and understand Petrarca’s intentions. So, from the second half of the XV century on, some 

intellectuals began to carry out research about her. Vellutello found out that she could have been a 

member of the De Sade family, and this hypothesis was supported in 1533 by the discovery -or maybe 

the creation- of her tomb inside the De Sade family sepulcher. According to a 1764 biography of 

Petrarca, written by a descendant of the De Sade family, Laura was identified as Laura de Noves, wife 

of Hugo De Sade, mother of 11 children, who died of disease in 1348. Obviously, the interest towards 

Laura cannot be separated from the will to dig up Petrarca’s life, in order to better understand his 

poetry. Though it is uncertain whether or not Laura was indeed a real person, it is perhaps more 

interesting to consider how she functions symbolically in Petrarca’s work, and how his characterization 

of her led him towards his unique style. Through the literary existence of Laura, Petrarca created an 

alter ego, which allowed him to write himself through an ‘other’ and explore two different kinds of 

alterities: the first one, as Petrarca becomes aware of his inability to appropriately reduce and describe 

Laura’s figure through poetry, is the revelation of his ethical consciousness, inherited by Platonism 

and stoicism. Secondly, Laura’s death allows him to probe notions of time and death in order to 

understand his earthly mortality. Petrarca’s love for Laura is a mechanism through which Petrarca the 

writer is able to investigate what it means to be human. “Even before the invention of the printing 

press […], Petrarca’s philology and humanist style initiated a new form of knowledge, in which 

memorization and literal transcription are substituted for an endless process of intellectual research” 

(Lollini 75). Petrarca’s research was carried on by several writers, who started imitating his style. This 

literary phenomenon is called “Petrarchism” and it began during Petrarca’s lifetime and continued to 

grow over the next three centuries.  

According to Berdan, imitations of Petrarch can be generally divided into two different categories: 

the form-based imitation or the content-based ones; Gigliucci even distinguishes between 13 different 

styles of Petrarchism that can sometimes be overlapped: Classicist, Pastoral, Solemn, Anti-solemn, 

Philosophical, Madrigalist, Experimental, Feminine and homophile, Nuptial (for the wife), Spiritual, 

Hybrid, Artificial and New-courtly. The literary productions which fit into these different categories 

would nowadays be considered, to various extents, as forms of plagiarism; indeed, until the Romantic 

period, imitation was considered both as a tribute to the original author, and a reliable and effective 

compositional method. As Jossa holds, the question of authorship and imitation from the XVI century 

up to Leopardi had completely different values, compared to the contemporary ones, since reading 

and writing were inter-dependent: “every reading experience led to writing, and every written 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  89 

composition was partially a re-writing of previous readings” (Jossa 13). This process and the imitation 

practice of Petrarchism, even though it could sound far from contemporary standards of authorship, 

is extremely familiar for contemporary digital writers/readers, as the Internet is an almost-unlimited 

repository of words and different forms of literature. Especially on social media, people are expected 

not only to read those words, but also to go through a process of personalization and re-writing of 

what they found -by chance or by research- on the web. The result is a continuous and self-nourishing 

circle of readings and writings which allows a wide spreading of culture never seen before, but which 

also gives rise to problems linked to the idea of authorship. 

Unfortunately, after the Romantic literary classification process, Petrarchists’ productions were 

dismissed as pure imitations of Petrarca and some of them, mostly those written by women, 

completely disappeared from the body of Italian literature. This is exactly what happened to Pellegra 

Bongiovanni’s work Risposte a nome di Madonna Laura alle Rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca in vita della 

medesima, as well as her other works.  

Petrarchism is such a widespread and complex undertaking that only a digital project could do 

justice to it, as Petrarca influenced not only Italian literature, but other national literatures and linguistic 

traditions, as well as working across all kinds of media. A digital project can bring together words, 

images, audio and video; moreover, it is always open to contributions, modifications and 

implementations. The project we are describing is what one might call “a spin-off” of the OPOB 

hypertext: the digitalized Canzoniere speaks to another canzoniere, and the words of Petrarca finally get 

an answer coming directly in the voice of Laura, embodied by Pellegra. Pellegra Bongiovanni 

represents a special case: she is not the only female Petrarchist but, as far as we know, she was the 

only one who created a real dialogue between Petrarca and Laura. Despite the criticism that buried 

her work in the shadows of Italian literature both as a woman and a Petrarchist, her style, writing 

quality and innovative spirit deserve to be recognized. 

1.2 Pellegra Bongiovanni: Life and Works 

Pellegra Bongiovanni’s name is seldom mentioned and mostly in depreciative ways from the 

second half of the XIX century. The only exception we found so far is a textbook for a girls’ school 

published in Palermo in 1873, in which Bongiovanni was defined as “an expert in painting, music and 

poetry […] wise and full of virtues” (Pedone Lauriel qtd. in Spallicci 105).  The entry about Pellegra 

in the Treccani Encyclopedia, one of the most important encyclopedias in the Italian language, defines 

her work as “an irrelevant proof of Petrarca’s legacy in the XVIII century” (Marziano). This is even 

more surprising when we compare this definition to her popularity during her life and up to fifty years 

after her death.  

Pellegra Bongiovanni was born in Palermo at the beginning of the XVIII century; her father was 

a painter and he was the first who recognized her intelligence, supporting her education. Pellegra was 

able to read Latin, Greek and was skilled in poetry, music and painting. In 1742 she married the lawyer 

Jacopo Rossetti and they moved to Rome, where they had a daughter, Marianna, who also became a 

poetess. Pellegra was a recognized member of the “Accademia dei Riaccesi” of Palermo and of 

“Accademia degli Arcadi” of Rome under the pseudonym of Ersilia Gortinia. Her importance within 

the Literary Academia is proven by her epistolary exchange with Casimiro Drago, who asked for her 

opinion about his translation of Virgilio’s Ecogle pastorali, and mainly by the fact that she was one of 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  90 

the few women among the Arcadians who performed her poems for the celebrations of the miraculous 

healing of John V, king of Portugal, and of the coronation of Joseph II as king of Romans. Her name 

is also mentioned is several marriage celebration records and she composed two musical plays, Aminta 

and Aristodemo, which went missing, and an oratorio in four voices, La Madre della Patria Santa Rosalia, 

with music by Michele Maurici. 

1.3 “Riposte di Madonna Laura” 

In 1762, the Roman publisher Frazesi e Paperi, which specialized in erudite and ecclesiastic books, 

published Pellegra’s most famous work, Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca, in 

nome della medesima, with the authorization of both the Catholic Church and the Arcadia. The book 

opens with an introduction divided in two parts, a dedication to the Tuscan Cardinal Neri Corsini and 

a warning: Pellegra recapitulates similar, previous works and presents her own, claiming that whatever 

the readers find to be “weak, it is attributable to the stupidity of my [her] genre; and if they will find 

something praiseworthy, it is due to the strength of imitation” (Bongiovanni, qtd. in Crivelli & Fedi 

15). In this clear example of captatio benevolentiae, she tries to evoke some sympathy in her readers but, 

while Petrarca constantly does it in his poems, Pellegra restrains it to her introduction, since he is the 

only direct addressee of her poetry. According to the spirit of her time, in which the epistolary novel 

was the main style6, she turns the Canzoniere into a dialogue between Petrarch and his muse, finally 

not silent anymore. 

Pellegra was not the first author who tried to give voice to Laura, however: Hyeronimo Maripietro 

in 1536 and Stephano Colonna in 1552, both mentioned in the Risposte’s introduction, had already 

voiced Laura, but as a spirit that tries to purify Petrarch’s desire and bring him closer to God. In the 

mid XVI century, by contrast, Camillo Scroffa parodied Petrarch’s Canzoniere in his Cantici di Fidenzio, 

portraying Laura as a man. The Risposte are not just love poems, nor are they parodies or moral 

corrections of Petrarca’s Canzoniere:  Pellegra is the only author who provided Laura with a plausible, 

corporeal, female voice, fulfilling a literary space left empty by previous authors and by Petrarca 

himself. Pellegra writes 235 poems, whereas there are 366 poems in the Canzoniere: she only answers 

those poems directly addressed to Laura while she was alive, since “the spirits detached from the 

bodies are not able to feel those emotions that are able to trouble them while they are still enclosed in 

flesh” (Bongiovanni 15). The muse becomes a writer, the object of love becomes a reasoning subject: 

the poetess, as a married woman herself, shows the struggle of a married woman seduced by the long 

courtship of a single poet who then consciously surrenders to this forbidden and bitter love. As Fedi 

and Crivelli point put in their introduction to the most recent edition of the Risposte, the dialogue 

between Laura/Pellegra and Petrarca assumes the shape of a “bourgeois” love story (Crivelli-Fedi, 

“Introduzione” 26), with everyday situations, in which Laura needs to hide her love in order to respect 

her social role, but she also suffers because Petrarca seems unable to understand the signs she keeps 

sending to him, giving us a portrait of their perpetual miscommunication. Laura/Pellegra is not 

intimidated by Petrarca’s love, but refuses physical passion for its own sake, instead considering it as 

the first step towards real love. 

Even if Pellegra followed both the Arcadia rules, which established a writing style recalling XVI 

century works, and Petrarca’s style, her modernity and her linguistic background show up in some 

vocabulary choices of Spanish-derived words or structure (i.e. “unqua” from “nunca”, never; “penso 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  91 

in” from “pienso en”, I think about…; endings of the first person singular of the Italian subjunctive 

following the Spanish scheme) and the loss of Latin, archaic forms (i.e. H drop, “Huom” – Petrarch/ 

“Uom” – Pellegra; assimilations i.e. ct > tt.). 

In the introduction, Pellegra claims that she only began imitating Petrarch as a stylistic exercise: 

she kept the last word of every line in each poem, maintaining the same rhymes, but played with the 

verses through metaphors and processes of trans-codification and reordering, showing extraordinary 

writing skills and language control, but also wit and irony. She wanted to publish Petrarca’s poems (in 

Italics, on odd pages) alongside her own, not with the arrogance of putting herself at the same level 

as Petrarca the author, but with the will to show a direct and equal interaction between the two lovers 

Petrarca and Laura. 

The decline of Bongiovanni’s fame started in 1832, when Antonio Lombardi continued 

Tiraboschi’s Storia letteraria (Literary history) erasing the equality provided by the dialogue structure and 

defined the Risposte as “an affected female variation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere”. In 1859, Scinà claimed 

that her work was “full of effort but empty of value”, just a mixture of “miserable dullness which 

would have defused Petrarch’s love” and up to 1991, in a publication for the third centennial of the 

Arcadia, Bongiovanni’s poems were still considered “almost ridiculous” (Graziosi). It was only in 

2014, thanks to Tatiana Crivelli, professor of Italian Literature for the University of Zurich and 

Roberto Fedi, professor of Italian Literature for the University of Perugia, that Pellegra’s work was 

finally restored to its original dialogic form and value. Their critical edition includes an Introduction 

that finally recognizes the value of Pellegra’s poetry, and the text republished in Milan in 1763 by 

Antonio Palazzi, discovered by Prof. Fedi at the Newberry Library of Chicago, while he was carrying 

out other research (Fedi, Interview). 

1.4 The Project #LauraSpeaks 

The aim of our project is to remediate, through different media and languages, the Risposte di 

Madonna Laura, in order to make it known and accessible to a broader, international public. We divided 

the workload in our team according to our background and expertise, also scheduling weekly meetings 

to discuss and peer-evaluate our individual work.  

The Risposte had already undergone a first remediation process even before we started our project, 

because it moved from printed paper to digital images, and so we did not use printed books but two 

scanned copies of the Risposte, as published by Crivelli and Fedi in their critical version and Palazzi’s 

version. We chose to type the poems into a simple Word document, turning the digital images into 

digital text, in order to work more easily and to be able to analyze the internal coherence of our 

translations at the end.  

We selected 24 of Bongiovanni’s sonnets and translated them into English. We developed our 

project restoring the dialogic, original form of the Risposte: using the pre-existing resources of the 

Oregon Petrarch Open Book, 7 we put together Petrarch’s original poems digitized from the critical 

versions of Savoca and Contini, Petrarca’s poem translations and tweets together with 

Laura/Pellegra’s voice. From the comparison between Petrarca’s critical editions included in the 

OPOB, Pellegra’s original words and Pellegra’s periphrases we drafted a basic prose translation and 

then turned it into a poetic translation. After deep analysis and translation, we condensed the poems’ 

meanings into tweets following the methodology elaborated by the OPOB (Lollini-Rosenberg), 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  92 

creating a Twitter dialogue between the pre-existing Petrarch tweets and the new ones from 

Pellegra/Laura. This dialogue shaped the underlying structure of our final remediation: a short movie 

that will be published on YouTube. Our hope is that this project would only be the first step towards 

a full translation of Pellegra’s Risposte and towards restoring her well-deserved but long-forgotten 

literary legacy. 

2. A Living Text: Pellegra Bongiovanni’s “Risposte” and Theories of 
Remediation 
Marena Lear 

 

2.1 Translation as Transformation 

Unease over the “adequacy” of translations has dominated the field of literary studies almost since 

the practice began. Many have written extensively about what makes a good or a bad translation, and 

examined the ethics of translation within the global system of exchange. These are issues that do 

require close examination, as translations of a work can have profound impacts on the way the original 

is received and understood. In undertaking the translation of thirty of Bongiovanni’s poems, we have 

attempted to, as Walter Benjamin put it, create the latest “unfolding” of the life of the source text. By 

“unfolding” a new iteration of the text, our goal was not to close its meaning, but rather open a work 

that was overlooked for centuries to a new readership, highlighting its place on the periphery of Italian 

literature. In the spirit of poststructuralist translation theory, which “calls attention to the exclusions 

and hierarchies that are masked by the realist illusion of transparent language, the fluent translating 

that seems untranslated” (Venuti 329), our translations of Bongiovanni in a certain sense intentionally 

highlight the impossibility of transparent translation – the “failure” of equivalence becomes the 

disjunction that seeds new possibilities of reading and interpretation. The goal was to destabilize both 

languages in order to deconstruct accepted or familiar understandings and establish new relations. 

Given that language itself is a living symbolic system that is constantly transforming and evolving, this 

destabilization, first through translation into English and then remediation into Tweets, is not such a 

radical step, especially considering the long tradition of compiling, rewriting, and imitating texts in 

European literary history.  

Our Twitter versions of the poems are not only condensed forms of the translations, but creative 

remediations that within the hypertext, take on a living quality that the reader can choose to engage 

with alongside other Petrarca poems, musical and artistic renderings, poetic re-writings, and 

translations. Bongiovanni’s work is an important part of the Petrarchism tradition, and its inclusion 

into the OPOB highlights its essential relationship to the RVF and places it on a level equal to other 

Petrarchists to whom history has been kinder. At the same time, “this apparatus of metatexts that 

constitute the corpus of the OPOB hypertext around Petrarch’s RVF  allows us to trace in a new, 

more accurate and comprehensive fashion its reception over the centuries as a collection of poems 

that maintain their individuality and autonomy while at the same time entering in multilateral 

relationships both within Petrarch’s forms of the Canzoniere and in the broader and multifaceted 

contexts represented by what we call Petrarchism.” (Lollini “Return” 76) Thus, the inclusion of the 

Risposte within this hypertext in turn enriches the readings of the RVF itself. In creating the English 

translation of the Risposte, and recreating it in and through digital mediums, our goal was to give 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  93 

Laura/Bongiovanni’s voice a strong echo throughout the vast realm of Petrarchan scholarship, and 

to bring this dialogue between Laura and Petrarca into the 21st century English-language digital 

conversation. 

2.2 A Digital Poetics 

The process of translation of this work was multi-layered. First, a native Italian speaker (Elisa 

Briante) read the original poem and then created a literal translation into English. Secondly, looking 

at both the original and the first translation draft, I created a second draft in English, with the intention 

to make the literal translation into a poem that conveys as much of the content of the original as 

possible while paying attention to the form. Next, our team (consisting of two native Italian speakers, 

Briante and Gerardo Pisacane, and myself, a native English and Spanish speaker) revised the second 

draft together and evaluated the quality of the second translation. One challenge of course was my 

limited of knowledge of Italian, but I found that in practice this was not as much of a barrier as it first 

appeared to be. The collaborative nature of this translation work resulted in a capacity to shift away 

from my habitual thinking in English and examine that familiar language anew, from a distance. Not 

only was I engaging with a language that was foreign to me, I was attempting to make the translation 

accommodate three individual interpretations of the source text, and because of these factors I was 

consistently obliged to expand and shift the borders of my target language, and question my own 

interpretation of the text. Another significant task was transposing the poetic form; the Italian lines 

balance a lilting rhythm with a strict rhyme scheme. Despite Roman Jakobson’s assertion that “poetry 

by definition is untranslatable” (143), I have attempted it nonetheless, and I chose not to prioritize 

rhyme by attempting to force the poems into a rhyme scheme and iambic meter. Instead, I maintained 

the content of each line, kept the sonnet sequence of an octave followed by a sestet, and embraced 

end rhymes and internal rhymes when they seemed to occur naturally. At certain moments it was 

fitting to emphasize alliteration or assonance, such as in sonnet number eleven, where the repetition 

of the soft “f” and “s” serves to sound out the frustrated, persistent sighs of Francesco the lover: 
 

But the soul can only be free when the body has failed. 

Your gazes, sighs, and fickle face 

made the force of your flames all too clear to my soul;  

thus it was fear that made me veil my breast and face… 
 

As Lawrence Venuti asserts in The Translator’s Invisibility, “both foreign text and translation are 

derivative: both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor 

the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and 

possibly conflicting with their intentions” (18). I take this as my point of departure when considering 

my role as translator: there exists no such thing as a ‘fixed,’ authentic, definitive text that is then 

distorted by translation. Rather, every text’s ‘meaning’ is contingent upon its specific linguistic and 

historical context. Friedrich Schleiermacher argues that the hermeneutic mode of interpretation brings 

the text into dialogue with other texts, and this comparative approach does not deny the uniqueness 

of an individual text, rather it acknowledges its distinctive attributes as relational rather than 

ontological. When I work on the translation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s text, I do so with the awareness 

that I am reconstituting this text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  94 

in 21st century English, and therefore I am not under any illusion that I am translating with perfect 

semantic equivalence – on the contrary, my attempt has been to emphasize the difference of the Italian 

text without completely domesticating it, or making it perfectly digestible for a modern English-

speaking readership. This is the method Venuti refers to as “foreignization”. It is for this reason that 

the poems, although in Italian they follow a strict rhyme scheme, and thus maintain a more natural 

flow, in English they have not been forced into a rhyme scheme. I also chose to maintain the delayed-

subject organization of many phrases, rather than moving the subject closer to the beginning of the 

sentence as is more common in English. One example of this is in sonnet number 67: 
 

Pigmalione invidiar non dei, 

Ch’ora in sasso, ora in donna, e assai piú volte 

Mi trasformo di quel, che non vorrei. 
 

Do not envy Pygmalion, 

because into stone, into woman, and into many other forms, 

I am transformed against my will. 
 

Here, the delayed subject is the I, and the delay in finding the I within the phrase mirrors the main 

idea of the poem, which is that the speaker, Laura, is not able to find herself within the many 

transformations and metamorphoses to which the poet Petrarca has subjected her. For him she lives, 

quite literally, in his imagination, and therefore the real Laura always eludes him as he attempts to find 

her in everything but her flesh-and-blood body. Throughout the poems, Laura insists on her 

autonomy, drawing attention to every moment in which it is denied her in Petrarca’s poems. At the 

same time, she conveys a deep understanding of the lover’s (or writer’s) condition as reliant upon the 

expression of that love for its continued existence. Bongiovanni, like Petrarca, was cognizant that 

writing is the only tool through which language can define the borders of the radically singular self, 

but this consciousness that is developed in writing does not transcend writing itself, thus it is of 

necessity a continuous process. As Massimo Lollini argues, “writing for Petrarch is not simply the 

neutral technology devoted to registering his emotions and the idols of his desire. It also constitutes 

the fundamental tool to appreciate the borders of human and individual consciousness and the limits 

of representation of the self and the other that he does not conceive in ontological terms but as a 

performative gesture” (“Return” 71). This is strikingly similar to the way in which today, our 

continuous engagement with digital text, via social media, blogs, vlogs, etc., seems to be the primary 

way we perform our selfhood. We firmly delineate the borders of our online selves through our 

carefully curated profiles, yet we know those selves to be dependent on how they are received, read, 

shared, and rewritten. This is essentially the premise behind remediation. According to Bolter and 

Grusin, remediation did not begin with the appearance of digital media, rather it has been an ongoing 

process throughout the last several hundred years of Western visual representation. Remediation is 

“the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another”; it is 

“the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (59). 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  95 

2.3 Twitterature and the Digital Remediation of Bongiovanni 

In 21st century digital culture, text has reached another stage in its evolution. It is no longer bound 

to just one form, attached to just one author (but not for the first time in human history). It can be 

the image of a meme, shared by thousands around the internet, acquiring new meaning in each context; 

or it can be a vlog which consists of someone reciting Beowulf in the original Old English. The form 

and material of the text contributes to its meaning, and therefore every change in the text’s material 

body produces new meaning. This re-mediation is also a form of translation: text that originated in 

one form is translated into another form, thereby creating a new context in which the reader can forge 

a relationship with it, and provide it with a unique meaning. This was our foundation for the final step 

of our translation: rewriting Bongiovanni’s poems as 180-character Tweets, released as responses to 

Petrarca Tweets already created by the Oregon Petrarch Open Book project. This is the progenitor of 

our translation project. Initiated at the University of Oregon by Lollini, it is a hypertext and digital 

tool created for the purpose of facilitating new ways of studying and teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere “in 

their making, evolution, and afterlife in translations, rewritings, and intersemiotic transpositions” 

(Lollini “Return” 72). The website contains many different methods for reading this text – critical 

editions, manuscripts, incunabula, and many different rewritings including a Twitter version – one 

Tweet for each of the 366 sonnets and songs. The OPOB’s point of departure is the idea that the 

Canzoniere, from its inception, was always a work-in-progress, a living project, a text that was never 

stable at any point in its life. Petrarch continued to revise and edit his masterwork up until his death. 

Therefore, that others continue to rewrite and revise this text is not a destructive process, but a creative 

one that honors the original author’s artistic and methodological approach; this is true as much for 

the Petrarchan women poets of the 17th and 18th centuries, as for contemporary reading and writing 

that engages with this form.  

Cyberspace is not merely the vessel through which the text is transmitted to the reader, but it is 

an active medium in the text’s creation. In creating a “Twitterature” version of Bongiovanni’s work, 

our goal was twofold: first, to make it a ‘living text’ in the 21st century sense of the phrase – that is, 

interactive, able to appeal to a wider audience than the printed version would be likely to have, and 

second, to engage with hypertext. “The digital environment provided by Web browsers and hypertext 

facilitates a multimodal and discontinuous kind of reading” (Lollini “Circles” 10). Thus, whereas linear 

patterns of thought associated with print impose narrowness and decontextualization in our reading 

and writing, hypertext destroys the physical isolation of texts, thereby embodying the Derridean idea 

of the borderless text (152-153), enabling nonlinear practices. To place the text in a hypertext 

environment such as the OPOB and then disseminating it through Twitter is to lift the borders from 

the text and allow a nonlinear reading of the poems that even allows the reader to become a kind of 

co-author; every comment and retweet is another transposition. 

In translating and remediating Pellegra Bongiovanni’s work, our intention is to make visible for 

the first time in English her unique way of engaging the Petrarchan poetic tradition, as well as to 

empower her female voice to make what has been traditionally a monologic meditation on love, into 

a dialogue between lovers/writers. We also aim to bring her voice closer to a modern audience by 

rewriting it for an interactive digital platform, which as we have seen is just the most recent step in the 

ongoing, living project that is Petrarchan literature. 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  96 

3. Francesco, You’ve Got Mail – the Movie. Literary Criticism Through 
Cinema. 
Gerardo Pisacane 

 

In this section of our critical paper, we investigate the pros and cons of the third cinematic 

remediation of our project, Francesco, You’ve Got Mail, intending to answer the following questions. 

First, what does making a short film on Pellegra Bongiovanni’s responses to Petrarca’s poems entail? 

Namely, what does our short movie neglect to narrate in comparison with the original sonnets and 

highlight instead? Second, and more importantly, how does our cinematic remediation embody the 

changes that the digital era has been producing on our way to approach and study literary works? In 

order to dig into the details of Francesco, You’ve Got Mail and answer the questions raised, I believe that 

a broader discussion on cinema as a medium is necessary to better understand the core of our project. 

I propose an analysis that takes into account both the effects on social consciousness and changes in 

human perception that are introduced by cinema. Whereas the study on the effects of cinema builds 

on Marshall McLuhan’s maxim that “the medium is the message” – and it sheds light on the impacts 

that the seventh art brings about apart from its content, – the analyses of the changes of cinema is 

based on the concept of remediation. In Francesco, You’ve Got Mail, the remediation is twofold, and it 

affects both the literary work by Petrarca and Bongiovanni, and the medium. On the one hand, the 

remediation of the literary work embodies the cinematic transposition of the Twitter dialogue that we 

produced earlier based on the responses to Petrarca's sonnets by Bongiovanni. On the other hand, 

the remediation concerning the medium represents what Bolter and Gruisin define as “the way in 

which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another” (59). Here, the 

improvement does not only point to the cultural and technical legacy that cinema inherited from 

previous media such as painting and photography but also the digital changes that films have been 

going through. As a matter of fact, our short movie represents a digital product which further 

complicates the discourse on remediation. 

3.1 Remediating Our Body with Cinema 

As McLuhan points out in his Understanding Media, each medium is capable of affecting both 

cultural practices and social behaviors of a community. The introduction of the railway, for example, 

revolutionized not only transportation but also cities’ morphology, facilitating urbanization and 

development. As a consequence, even the social interactions among individuals changed as people 

started to move and gather more dynamically. Taking into account the effects of media, one could ask 

how cinema as a medium has changed people and society? McLuhan already provides us with valuable 

insight to illustrate the effects of cinema on our lives, theorizing the idea of the medium as an extension 

of our body. “As an extension and expediter of the sense life, any medium at once affects the entire 

field of the senses” (55). In the case of movies, close up and extreme close-up confirm McLuhan’s 

theory. Both a close-up and an extreme close up show a subject in detail and from close range. For 

instance, through an extreme close up of an eye, the viewers can distinctly discern the eye’s iris in a 

way they would not be able to do only with the help of human sight. Functioning as a body extension, 

the medium of cinema, therefore, enhances viewers’ sight.  

In a broader sense, the body’s extension argued by McLuhan also has to do with the collective 

consciousness of a society. McLuhan highlights that back in the golden age of movie stars, actors and 

http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/hsda/article/view/4639/4514


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  97 

actresses from Hollywood films served as trendsetters and influencers in the world of beauty, fashion, 

and home design. As a consequence, commercials and ads would resemble well-known movie scenes 

in order to be performative and urge consumers to buy the advertised products. French philosopher 

and sociologist Edgar Morin offers perceptive insights on the effects of cinema on the collective 

consciousness. In his in L’Esprit du Temps which aims to examine mass culture and its outcomes on 

society, Morin argues that Hollywood cinema has spread all over the world the paradigm of 

Americanness and its values, such as middle-class lifestyle, happy endings, leisure, youth, and 

hypermasculinity (124). As soon as Hollywood movies became popular, those values started to take 

root in Western society, shaping our way of thinking as well as our consumption habits. Following 

Morin’s idea of social imaginary affected by cinema, we claim that the title of our project Francesco, 

You’ve Got Mail, for example, brings automatically to mind the concept of online dating since it is a 

reference to the rather popular movie You’ve Got Mail.1 The cinematic quote serves precisely to engage 

the viewers, exploiting a relatively famous hint. 

Going back to the enhancement of the human body through media, cinema strengthens and 

expands the senses of vision and hearing also because it enables viewers to go back and forth within 

a story and to be in two places at the same time. The possibilities of traveling both through time and 

space are due to the practice of editing. The editing consists of assembling separate cinematic 

sequences that happen in different moments and spaces. By doing so, the editing not only takes to 

extremes the fundamental distinction between story and plot of a film, but it also displays the cinema’s 

faculty to expand human senses. Whereas the story represents both events and actions of a film, the 

plot pertains to how the movie narrates the facts. The technique of flashbacks and cross-cutting are 

good examples of how editing works to fulfill an engaging plot. If a flashback unveils previous events 

of a narrative, thus enabling viewers to travel through time, the cross-cutting alternates on the screen 

two different actions that occur in two different locations, allowing spectators to go across places. 

Being able to cross more than one space and time in the movie’s narrative because of the editing 

proves that during a film screening, viewers oversee and overhear the narrated events and hence 

confirm the general idea of the human senses’ enhancement through media. That augmentation of 

senses is even more effective in Francesco, You've Got Mail since the plot interweaves words and stories 

from different centuries. It does so also because the encounters between digital and cinema brings the 

body extension that McLuhan connects to media to an even more spectacular improvement with a 

cognitive dimension. For instance, consider how sharply viewers can notice the details of a landscape 

thanks to high resolution images. That is why in the next paragraph, I take into account George 

Landow’s reflections on digital cinema explaining how they worked as a remarkably hermeneutical 

and technical tool to construct our short movie.   

3.2 Immediacy of Francesco, You’ve Got Mail 

In his Hypertext 3.0, George Landow claims that computer technology has profoundly transformed 

cinema both in the process of shooting and editing. As Landow explains, the digital remediation of 

the seventh art has generally improved the quality of the image and the visual experience. Leaving 

aside the important and broader debate on the consequences, not always “positive”, of the digital 

 
1 You’ve Got Mail is a mainstream film from 1990s, whose plot pivots on a passionate and anonymous Internet romance 
between the two protagonists. 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  98 

revolution on cinema, here, I want to argue that by improving images' standard, digitalization also 

contributed to reinforcing the sense of immediacy in cinema. I am using here the term immediacy as 

understood by Bolter and Grusin. Namely, it refers to the ability that each medium has to make its 

presence disappear while conveying a message in order to give its addressee the chance to perceive 

only the “unmediated” content. Bolter and Grusin also claim that immediacy is not only a prerogative 

of new and digital media: “A painting by the seventeenth-century artist Pieter Saenredam, a 

photograph by Edward Weston, and a computer system for virtual reality are different in many 

important ways, but they are all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of 

the medium and the act of mediation” (11). Following Bolter and Grusin's argument, high-quality 

digital images convey nowadays a sense of even more powerful immediacy because of their outstanding 

verisimilitude. In the logic of immediacy that digital cinema aims to pursue, it is furthermore possible 

to consider as valid tools computer-manipulated images, special effects, and graphics, which are all 

constitutive of the digital editing and contribute to making viewing experience extremely engaging. 

Also, when it comes to our film project, they provided us with insights that turned out critical to the 

construction of our cinematic remediation. 

  In Francesco, You've Got Mail, for instance, the digital editing was fundamental to put Francesco, 

Laura and Pellegra, the three main characters of an unrequited love story, in dialogue with one another. 

In the movie, Francesco and Laura ‘cybermeet’ on Tinder. Here, it is worthwhile to highlight that the 

use of the dating app Tinder functions, as Morin would argue, as a mass-cultural reference that the 

plot employs as a narrative element to catch viewers' attention. Given the rise of dating apps these 

days2, in fact, it is reasonable to believe that our Francesco, You've Got Mail might have more chances to 

convey the remediation of the Canzoniere to millennials by merging the relation between Francesco 

and Laura with the widespread practice of online dating.  

  However, the use of Tinder works at another level of remediation as well. I want to claim that 

staging the meeting on Tinder embodies our attempt to recreate on screen the patterns of the first 

intertextual interaction that occurred between Petrarca and Bongiovanni. In reality, although the two 

poets never met in person, they nonetheless did virtually on paper as the Sicilian writer studied and 

replied to the original poems of the Canzoniere. In a way, it can be argued that Bongiovanni's 

remediation of Petrarca's poems is as virtual as to communicate on dating apps for two strangers. 

Both forms of information exchange are displayed, accessed, and collected by a medium. While in the 

case of Petrarca and Bongiovanni that medium is the book, whether it is manuscript or printed, in our 

cinematic remediation it turns to be the smartphone. The smartphone's choice, as a medium, cannot 

be considered accidental since it is nothing but the quintessence of the digital landscape where the 

text has become so fluid that triggers a potentially infinite mode of remediation. As Landow claims, 

“digital text is always open, unborded, unfinished and unfinishable capable of infinite extension” 

(Landow, 196). That openness of the digital text depends on its replicability. On the internet, users 

can find texts that they will adapt to their needs and reshare with such simplicity never experienced 

this way by any medium before. That is precisely why there was no better medium than smartphone 

to express the replicability of the text already practiced, on paper, by Bongiovanni. 

 
2 For example, “Love and dating after the Tinder revolution” at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42988025. 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  99 

In Francesco, You've Got Mail, the emphasis on virtuality becomes then the leitmotif of the entire 

plot. Right after the match on Tinder, Francesco starts messaging Laura with poetic loving words. 

Laura, however, does not requite Francesco's feelings, nor is she willing to meet him in person. 

Eventually, she confides in her best friend Pellegra, asking for help. As a result, in order to rescue 

Laura, Pellegra decides to catfish Francesco, pretending to be Laura and responding to Francesco's 

messages. In the end, Francesco will never meet in person either Laura or Pellegra, except for the last 

scene in which he bumps into the Sicilian poet. Although Pellegra knows who exactly Francesco is, 

Francesco ignores her since he never made her acquaintance. In the same way, the author of the 

Canzoniere never came across the Sicilian poet because of the centuries that separate them, yet 

Bongiovanni knew Petrarca very well through his poems.  

  Despite the fact that the characters never meet in person, the plot still intertwines the three 

protagonists’ storylines so that viewers watch live the give and take between Francesco and Pellegra 

(alias Laura). The plot's aim is, once again, to preserve the pattern of the intermedial exchange that 

involved the two original poets. As Briante discussed above, Bongiovanni gives voice through her 

rewriting to the character of Laura, who never speaks within Petrarca's sonnets. She imitates Petrarca's 

poetic style, echoes his words, and thus corroborates in a way the afterlife of the Canzoniere. Looking 

at the paradigm of Bongiovanni's remediation, the viewers can understand then why, for example, our 

cinematic Pellegra takes the floor and performs as Laura or why Francesco can never acknowledge 

her.      

  From a cinematic perspective, I want to point out that the digital remediation of cinema turned 

to be a fundamental factor in carrying out our intention to be as faithful as possible to the remediation 

of Pellegra, which is specifically the input of our entire project. Digital editing, special effects, and 

graphics, as far as simplistic they might appear in our short movie, helped to display the virtual 

encounter of the previous remediation. In detail, what puts in dialogue the characters of our story are 

both cross-cutting editing and on-screen text messages. The cross-cutting follows the paradigm of the 

continuity editing, which represents in cinema the coherent juxtaposition of shots so as to avoid 

misleading interruptions or confusing incongruences in both sequence and storytelling. In our short 

movie, the continuity editing connects, for example, the scenes that present the sender Francesco and 

the addressee Pellegra while they exchange messages. To understand the coherence that the continuity 

editing demands, for example, consider that where the shot A displays Francesco texting, the shot B 

needs to report on screen the recipient of his message. Perhaps, he is merely navigating on the Internet 

or swiping left on tinder. If so, those images will be following the frame A. In short, no matter what, 

in the continuity editing, each action visually has to correspond to its reaction. On the other hand, 

even the on-screen text messages which consist of part of the Twitter series produced in the second 

remediation intend to highlight the protagonists' correspondence. By working as cinematic dialogues 

staging the characters' verses, they show without filters the most intimate thoughts of two potential 

lovers.    

  Given the specificities of cross-cutting editing and on-screen text messages, it goes without 

saying that both make viewers feel as if they participated live in the give and take between Francesco 

and Pellegra. That feeling embodies precisely the immediacy discussed above when people engage in the 

message overlooking the medium and its negotiation. In Francesco, You've Got Mail, I want to claim that 

the message threads together two narratives, both Petrarca's sonnets and Bongiovanni's responses, 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  100 

presenting them as if they were happening at once. After all, it is not different from what Bongiovanni 

did when she replied to Petrarca's verses as if he could read her words. Moreover, it is not different 

from what we made Petrarca and Pellegra do on Twitter either, staging an online interaction between 

their 'fake' profiles.  

  Reasonably, the added value of our short movie is in the simultaneity of the message that it 

conveys. In other words, while for the Twitter thread, for instance, users must visit either Petrarca's 

profile or Pellegra's, and scroll Twitter's wall in order to participate in their exchange, our movie offers 

a selection of their words on one pixelated surface at the same time. Although our video might seem 

to address a more traditional, passive audience given the absence of hypermedia links, however, I want 

to point out that our movies also include in the credits a barcode that redirects the active viewers to 

the OPOB page and Petrarca and Pellegra’s Twitter profiles simply by taking a picture with their 

phone. By doing so, the movie proves to have in mind as an ideal audience, the wreader. The term, 

coined by George Landow, suggests that readers nowadays consume data but yet improve it with the 

aim to share with the collective community. Following Landow’s idea, therefore, our viewer will not 

only watch Francesco, You've Got Mail, but also potentially reposts, retweets, and thus remediates our 

content.  

  By calling to action our ideal audience through that barcode, in a way, our movie manifests 

another significant effect that the digital had on the seventh art and that Landow defines as hypertext 

cinema. He points to the hypertext narrative in the digital movies, showing how some films allow 

viewers even to lead the movie’s story. They do so demanding the viewers’ interaction so that the 

story can go on. By clicking either a window or another appeared on the screen at some point in the 

narration, the audience will determine the plot twists. Certainly, we are not asking viewers to lead our 

movie’s narrative, and our unsophisticated expertise in digital techniques did not permit us to produce 

a real example of hypertext cinema. However, by inviting them to navigate the OPOB and the Twitter 

profiles after watching, we expect them to interact with a hypertext that exceeds the confines of our 

cinematic message and dialog with both the Canzoniere and Bongiovanni’s remediation with the hope 

that they might continue a potentially unfinishable story.   

3.3 Hypermediacy of Francesco, You’ve Got Mail 

When analyzing the concept of remediation that inevitably determines the medium’s nature, one 

must also bear in mind the principle of hypermediacy that Bolter and Grusin define as a medium that 

remediates another. It is precisely the combination of two or more media in one that represents 

hypermediacy. This process is not as recent as one might think. For instance, consider how incunabula 

included illustrations to supplement the written words back in the 1500’s. What ensues from Bolter 

and Grusin’s analyses is also that media must be considered as an entanglement of social, economic, 

aesthetic and cultural meanings that denote a community: “Media have the same claim to reality as 

more tangible cultural artifacts; photographs, films, and computer applications are as real as airplanes 

and buildings” (19). Taking as its starting point the legitimacy of media to be examined as cultural 

products, I want to put in dialogue our Francesco, You've Got Mail with the concept of hypermediacy in 

this last paragraph to finally highlight that the complexity behind our cinematic product makes it not 

less valuable than any close reading in the realm of literary criticism.  



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  101 

  In general, hypermediacy echoes McLuhan’s idea that any medium embeds other media’s content 

as well. He conceptualizes that “[t]he content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the 

content of print, and print is the content of the Telegraph” (23). In cinema, it is clear that such an idea 

suggests something more than a movie can be based on a literary work. Indeed, McLuhan indicates 

that each medium potentially borrows and develops other media’s specificities. Following this 

principle of entanglement, one should consider cinema, for instance, as the encounter of oral literature, 

writing, photography, and digital among other things. First, cinema echoes oral literature considering 

that a movie works, in a way, as an ancient storyteller. However, storytelling and orality had already 

undergone another substantial remediation by radio in the 20th century. As a consequence, one could 

argue that cinema remediated radio as well since we might think of the voiceover that some movies 

adopt as the remediation of radio host’s talks. Second, cinema incorporates writing. Indeed, any movie 

is, before being the practice of filming, a screenplay in which the written (and digitalized) word 

describes story, characters, and setting. Third, cinema is grounded in photography's techniques such 

as light and perspective, which, in turn, embodies the specificities of painting. Finally, I have already 

discussed above the encounter between the digital and cinema, and its outcomes, such as digital 

editing, special effects, and graphics on the one hand, and the development of hypertext narrative on 

the other. To sum up, therefore, cinema represents a marvelous example of what Bolter and Grusin 

call hypermediacy, a multilayered work of art, where each layer incorporates languages and techniques 

borrowed from another previous medium based on a principle of aggregation with no exclusion.  

  In our short movie, hypermediacy is easy to find in both medium and content. As regards 

medium, hypermediacy takes place in three forms. First, the on-screen messages between the characters 

recall the massive return of writing that is affecting our identity as both reader and writer to the point 

that we embody the figure of wreader. Second, the on-screen text messages which use the 

distinguishable interface of Tinder also highlight the presence of the phone. As mentioned before, the 

phone has become the embodiment of the digital and its infinite possibilities, including looking for a 

soulmate. Third, the use of soundtrack with the choice of specific songs whose lyrics function as lines 

between the characters, thus compensating the lack of dialogues. Each song conveys a particular 

meaning, which represents one semantic layer within the multifaceted message. Following the 

hypertext’s principle of entanglement, the songs cannot be understood without the images and vice 

versa. However, in our video, hypermediacy goes even further and follows Jill Nelmes’s definition of 

film. As Nelmes states:  

Film is a linguistic as well as a visual medium [...] since movies have linguistic communication 

through the presence of dialogue or voiceover on the soundtrack, as well as the inclusion of 

printed text within the image (such as intertitles, shots of newspapers, books, letters). (80) 

Some shots of Francesco, You’ve Got Mail display the presence of more than one medium. One 

sequence in particular emphasizes hypermediacy very well, staging together not one but five media on 

the screen: on the one hand, books and a blackboard which are both references to the writing, on the 

other, a phone, laptop, and television which represent the advent of digital media.  

  Finally, hypermediacy also concerns the content of our cinematic product. Francesco, You've Got 

Mail, its story and words derive from the collective criticism, circulation of ideas, and production of 

new meanings first carried on by the people of the OPOB project. Later on, the meanings produced 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  102 

by previous readers/wreaders encountered our team’s aim to negotiate their Canzoniere’s remediation 

and Bongiovanni’s. Our movie is the latest stage of very long remediation that pass through several 

media, such as vellum manuscript, paper, digital writing, cinema and new media, and several play of 

interpretations. All this work would have not been possible without the collective intelligence made 

possible by the creative use of the Internet. As a matter of fact, our movie is only the latest result of a 

new digital literary criticism that is based on virtual community's labor. Here, I am referring to the 

wreader who is, as mentioned before, the ideal audience addressed by our cinematic remediation. The 

wreader is the ideal player within what Pierre Levy defines as cosmopedia, namely, a cybernetic space that 

not only [...] “makes available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at 

a given moment, but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation, and development” 

(217). It is worthwhile noting that the way Levy conceives cosmopedia makes all of its users all potentially 

critical thinkers and of the internet the ideal place for critical analyses. This turning point into the 

reader’s outline is crucial within the discourse of literary criticism anchored in the digital environment 

since it deterritorializes knowledge and facilitates a potentially infinite as well as democratic circulation 

of ideas and meanings without which our movie could have never come to life.  Going back to the 

questions that I raised at the beginning of this section, I want to conclude emphasizing that our movie 

does not diminish neither Petrarca’s sonnets nor Bongiovanni’s responses. In the same way, 

Bongiovanni was able through her remediation to perpetuate the afterlife of the Canzoniere providing 

us with different readings of the text, I believe that Francesco, You’ve Got Mail is capable of enriching 

the virtual conversation that occurred between the two poets. The movie does so acknowledging her 

as a poet and displaying her words through a cinematic validation. Despite that some critics might 

consider despicable the televisual transposition we made of Bongiovanni’s poems, I want to claim that 

Francesco, You’ve Got Mail must be merely understood as another reading of the literary work; a reading 

that we made from distant range, as the etymology of the word televisual itself suggests. Perhaps only 

by distancing oneself from the text can one glimpse different facets of it. Bongiovanni did so too, as 

she was able to portray a silent Laura to whom she decided to give voice. As Bongiovanni ‘dared’ to 

respond to the untouchable Petrarca, we ‘dared’ to give voice, through a cinematic product, to a 

forgotten female poet. 

Project Conclusion 

In one of her sonnets, Pellegra Bongiovanni writes, “My admiration is so great in these immortal 

pages/ that if my recitation did not contain fault/I would amaze the world without art.” We can say 

the same, for in our translations and remediations, we have attempted to portray our admiration for 

an artist whose work has not been sufficiently appreciated. The translation of her sonnets from Italian 

into English, and then the transformation of sonnets into Tweets, has restored the dialogue form of 

the work’s original printed version, with the aim of highlighting her own rewriting of Petrarca and 

Laura “love story” that finally gives voice to the muse, and gives solid presence to the woman who 

for so long was only an objectified image with no agency. Bongiovanni not only presented us with a 

new characterization of Laura, she also remediated Petrarca by creating a retelling of the story. 

Although she followed Petrarca’s style of writing, she also altered the tradition of Petrarchism itself 

by making it a dialogue between two writers/poets, not just between a man and a woman, thus making 

her Petrarca’s equal. She claims her own authority as poet and as humanist independently of her 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  103 

identity as a woman (and thus compelled to speak on behalf of Laura) and this sets her apart from 

other Petrarchists who only imitate his style. In this sense, Bongiovanni anticipated how remediation 

works in placing a previous text in a new context but also repurposing the text to create new meaning. 

“The goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Furthermore, because all 

mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process 

of reforming reality as well” (Bolter & Grusin 56). Bongiovanni reformed the idea of being a female in 

the Petrarchan tradition – which refers to both refiguring the character of Laura, and to being a woman 

writing poems in the style of Petrarca.  

In our project, we are following Bongiovanni’s example of refashioning the Petrarchan tradition 

by translating her remediation into both a digital language and audiovisual content, thereby engaging 

a digital wreadership. Within the larger field of literary criticism, texts cannot be understood as isolated 

from other texts, and interpretation of text is not a matter of uncovering a hidden ‘meaning’. Rather, 

just as hermeneutic interpretation compels us to understand texts in their relation to other texts and 

as historically located documents, the same can be said of remediation in the digital era: meaning is 

created in the relationship between reader and text, and in the relationship between text and other 

texts (broadened to include film, music, song lyrics, social media posts, tags, etc.). This is the theory 

behind hypertext. As Pierre Lévy states, “a conventional linear text, even digitized, can’t be read as a 

true hypertext, or database, or a system that will automatically create texts as a function of interactions 

fed by the reader” (Lévy 50). Thus, we as readers are also writers in the sense that we produce text in 

our interactions with hypertext. “We could consider the contemporary trend towards the 

hypertextualization of documents as a movement toward indistinctness, the blending of the functions 

of reading and writing…in the hypertext every act of reading is an act of writing” (Lévy 58). This idea, 

in a broader sense, makes clearer the connections between texts, and the entanglements between 

reader and writer, which defines that new space of knowledge that Levy names ‘cosmopedia’. In the 

cosmopedia, every information becomes potentially accessible to every participant in the collectivity, 

and each information becomes the result of both negotiation and developments. Our remediations, 

in conclusion, continue to honor the Petrarchan tradition, hopefully inspiring further reading and 

perhaps future remediations of both Bongiovanni and Petrarca, by bringing them into the 21st century 

and returning to a method of imitation as tribute, and reading as re-writing and re-creation. 

Works Cited 
 

Abbadessa, Emanuela . “La palermitana che diede voce alla Laura di Petrarca” 15 Jan 2015, La 

Repubblica.it,  Web: https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2015/01/15/la-

palermitana-che-diede-voce-alla-laura-di-petrarcaPalermo11.html 

Alonso, Dámaso. La Poesia Del Petrarca e Il Petrarchismo (Mondo Estetico Della Pluralità).  “Lettere Italiane”, 

XI, 3. 1959. Web. www.jstor.org/stable/26245869.  

Ascoli, A., & Falkeid, U. (2015). Introduction. In A. Ascoli & U. Falkeid (Eds.), The Cambridge 

Companion to Petrarch (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 1-10). Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press. doi: 10.1017/CCO9780511795008.002. 

https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2015/01/15/la-palermitana-che-diede-voce-alla-laura-di-petrarcaPalermo11.html
https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2015/01/15/la-palermitana-che-diede-voce-alla-laura-di-petrarcaPalermo11.html
http://www.jstor.org/stable/26245869


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  104 

Baudino, Mario. La sciagurata rispose: Petrarca e la femminista del Settecento che osò difendere Laura, “La 

Stampa.it”, January 2015. Web: http://cedocsv.blogspot.com/2015/01/la-sciagurata-rispose-

petrarca-e-la.html. 

Berdan, John M. A Definition of Petrarchism. “PMLA”, XXIV, 4, 1909. Web: 

ww.jstor.org/stable/456804 

Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 

2002. 

Crivelli, Tatiana & Roberto Fedi, Trans. Pellegra Bongiovanni, Risposte a nome di Madonna Laura alle 

Rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca in vita della medesima. Roma-Padova: Editrice Antenore, 2014. 

--------. “Introduzione” Risposte a nome di Madonna Laura. IX-XXIX. 

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern Univ. Pr, 2008. Print.  

Gigliucci, Roberto. Appunti sul Petrarchismo plurale. “Italianistica: Rivista Di Letteratura Italiana”, 

XXXIV, 2, 2005. Web: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23937524"www.jstor.org/stable/23937524. 

Graziosi, Elisabetta. Arcadia femminile: presenze e modelli, “Terzo centenario d’Arcadia”, Roma: Arcadia, 

1991. 

Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader, edited by 

Lawrence Venuti, Routledge, 2012. pp. 126-133. 

Jossa, Stefano.  Petrarchismo europeo. Leggere e scrivere Petrarca nel Rinascimento, “Italique”, XIV | June 2014. 

Web. http://journals.openedition.org/italique/291. 

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. The Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 2006.  

Landow, George P. “Popular Fallacies about Hypertext.” Designing Hypermedia for Learning, 1990, pp. 

39– 59.  

Lévy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace. Cambridge: Perseus, 1997. 

Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Plenum Trade, 1998. 

Lollini, Massimo. “Return to Philology and Hypertext in and around Petrarch’s Rvf.” Humanist Studies 

& the Digital Age, [S.l.], v. 1, n. 1, p. 66-79, feb. 2011. ISSN 2158-3846. Available at: 

<http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/index.php/hsda/article/view/1101>. 

---------. “Scrittura e Alterità in Francesco Petrarca.” Annali D'Italianistica, XIX, 2001, Web: JSTOR,  

HYPERLINK "http://www.jstor.org/stable/24008626"www.jstor.org/stable/24008626. 

Lollini, M. & Rosenberg, Rebecca. “Digital Philology and Twitterature”. “Lector in Rete: Figures of the 

Readers in Digital Humanities. Monographic Volume of the e-journal Humanist Studies & the Digital 

Age. Eds. M. Lollini and J. Staiger. October 2015. Web. http://journals.oregondigital.org  

Luciano Marziano. “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, Treccani Encyclopaedia online, Vol. 12, 

1971, Web: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pellegra-bongiovanni_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ 

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Corte Mader: Ca, Gingko Press, 1964.  

http://cedocsv.blogspot.com/2015/01/la-sciagurata-rispose-petrarca-e-la.html
http://cedocsv.blogspot.com/2015/01/la-sciagurata-rispose-petrarca-e-la.html
https://uoregon-my.sharepoint.com/personal/mfgaede_uoregon_edu/Documents/Open%20Access/%20http:/www.jstor.org/stable/23937524%22www.jstor.org/stable/23937524
http://journals.openedition.org/italique/291
http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/index.php/hsda/article/view/1101
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24008626
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24008626
http://journals.library.oregonstate.edu/hsda
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pellegra-bongiovanni_(Dizionario-Biografico)/


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  105 

Morin, Edgar. Lo Spirito Del Tempo. IBS, Milano, Meltemi, 1970.  

Nelmes, Jill. An Introduction To Film Studies. New York, Routledge, 2003.  

Ortolani, Giuseppe Emanuele . Biografia degli uomini illustri della Sicilia ornata de' loro rispettivi ritratti 

compilata dall'avvocato d.r. d.n. Giuseppe Emanuele Ortolani e da altri letterati, Napoli: Niccola Gervasi, 

1817-1821;  

Pazzi, Martina. Interview to Prof. Roberto Fedi. “Pellegra Bongiovanni? In alcuni versi supera il Petrarca” 

n1/2017, REL, Unistrapg https://www.unistrapg.it/it/rel/articoli/intervista-al-prof-roberto-

fedi-pellegra-bongiovanni-alcuni-versi-supera-il-petrarca. 

Quadrio, Francesco Saverio. Della storia e della ragione d'ogni poesia, Bologna: Pisarri, 1739-44. 

Russo, Luigi. Il Petrarca e il Petrarchismo. “Belfagor”, IX, 5. 1954, Web: ww.jstor.org/stable/26111971. 

Scinà, Domenico. Prospetto della storia letteraria di Sicilia nel secolo decimottavo, Palermo: Officio tip. Lo 

Bianco, 1859. 

Spallicci, Giuseppe. Cenni biografici di alcune donne illustri italiane operetta, proposta come libro di lettura nei collegi 

e nelle scuole femminili, Palermo: L. Pedone Lauriel, 1873. 

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge, New York, NY, 1995 

 

 

Appendix 

Translation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer 

Francesco Petrarca, in nome della medesima 

 

The following translation includes 23 sonnets (n°1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 9; 14; 28; 46; 58; 63; 66; 67; 73; 

74; 79; 85; 96; 109; 195; 196; 198) and a madrigal (n°99). From n°46 to n°198, the poems present 

double numbering: the first number refers to Pellegra’s poem, the second one refers to the exact 

number of Petrarca’s poem of reference, as numbered in his RVF. The numbering follows the order 

of Fredi and Crivelli’s critical edition of the Risposte. In the first edition of her Risposte, Pellegra 

published Petrarca’s poems side by side with her poems using progressive numbering, while Fredi and 

Crivelli respected the original numbers of Petrarca’s Canzoniere. 

We decided to maintain the structure of the Italian sonnets, made by two quatrains and two tercets, 

and to create a system of rhymes and rhythm less traditional but more appealing to modern e-readers.  

Petrarca’s sonnets are not included in this appendix, but they can be read on the OPOB database. 

Also, we are currently digitizing the full text of the Pellegra’s 1762 original edition of the Risposte. It 

will be available in the OPOB in 2020. 

 

*** 

 

https://www.unistrapg.it/it/rel/articoli/intervista-al-prof-roberto-fedi-pellegra-bongiovanni-alcuni-versi-supera-il-petrarca
https://www.unistrapg.it/it/rel/articoli/intervista-al-prof-roberto-fedi-pellegra-bongiovanni-alcuni-versi-supera-il-petrarca


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  106 

Responses in the Name of Madonna Laura to the Poems of Messer Francesco Petrarca  

Translated by Elisa Briante, Marena Lear, and Gerardo Pisacane 

 

1. 

 

I hear the sound of scattered rhymes, 

that from your vibrant heart you sent, 

when, dazzled by love’s tricks, 

you made me appear what I am not: 

 

And so I ponder: 

Why blame me for your pain? 

If I was the innocent cause of your love, 

Why should I ask forgiveness? 

 

For Heaven knows, and the whole world too: 

it was only you who often raved; 

it was not I, of myself I am not ashamed; 

 

I ask for mercy, for I know what is the fruit of Lovers, 

I know Love, and I see clearly:  

he is not sweet, or only sweet in dreams. 

 

2. 

 

It was not, no matter what you think, Love’s revenge  

against your many wrongs; 

and if he took his golden bow in hand 

like a man preparing to fight for victory 

 

he did not tame the virtue barricaded within,  

which had until then been defending you, 

and which made the mortal arrow  

fall uselessly through your heart. 

 

And even if he won this last assault, 

Within you there remains such strength, and space –  

you can still arm yourself against the victor. 

 

Let him despair who cannot obtain virtue from Heaven,  

and who, caught in the harsh torments of Love,  

says: I could, but Love will not help me. 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  107 

 

3. 

 

The first time your cheek paled 

when you fixed your eyes on mine, and on my soul 

Love assaulted us both, but I protected myself –  

he ensnared you but did not bind me. 

 

I hastened to protect my heart, 

remembering the day our mighty Maker  

suffered Death, and our woes 

and obstructions to happiness began. 

 

So Love, finding neither unarmed, 

did not open a passage to the heart 

and did not await me at the gate; 

 

but turned to you to give him justice –  

you, who were in such a perilous state –  

and to me Love never even showed his bow. 

 

4. 

 

Nature and Art have long toiled, 

investing all their noble mastery, 

to make, in this and in the other sphere, 

Heaven’s only soul on earth, the City of Mars, 

 

faithful guardian of the holy scriptures, 

through which the higher truth was revealed to the world: 

in choosing it for Peter’s post, Heaven willed it  

to be a part of its immeasurable power. 

 

God showed less mercy to Arezzo, 

but it was raised to a glorious state 

when He made it your birthplace; 

 

thus Heaven and Nature, who have given it  

such a sublime honor, now always give thanks, 

for with you, their glory to the world was born. 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  108 

5. 

 

How can I believe that Love 

has already ruled you so harshly, 

that he, giving you no hope for freedom, 

tightly binds you in his snare? 

 

If your name has the sound of freedom, 

and then escape follows? Facing his strength,  

you can say to Love: with all honor, 

I FRANkly Can ESCape your arrOws! 

 

Unfurl, then, the battle flag; 

and beneath it gather every virtue 

for the lofty endeavor so becoming of you. 

 

But if your cowardly heart disdains 

to use its strength, never will the wreath 

of Apollo crown your head.  

 

6. 

 

Stop, O my heart, the unjust and vain desire  

to follow my soul, which turns and flees: 

it is surrendering too far to Love’s cure  

to indulge my fiery passion. 

 

When I send my soul the sweet sights of my eyes, 

when pain speaks, oh! it does not hear me; 

yet in running to it, you cannot turn,  

mad heart! You should be reluctant. 

 

What sour fruit is harvested  

from a sweet Love! And yet I give myself to him,  

seeing to what torture it leads me. 

 

But who could ever reap something better from it? 

Oh, for seeing another’s despair deprives one of hope,  

instead of giving comfort. 

 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  109 

9. 

 

Neither the Sun’s warmth, nor the shadow’s cold,  

have extinguished in you  

that sweet, errant desire for love  

that releases your heart from impure desires, 

 

which come from thoughts concealed inside. 

But the soul can only be free when the body has failed. 

Your gazes, sighs, and fickle face 

made the force of your flames all too clear to my soul;  

 

thus it was fear that made me veil my breast and face 

and made me veil the willing gaze that gathers into itself 

if the beauty is taken away from your fervent eyes. 

Do not blame the veil –  

it is not the Sun or the cold I seek protection from,  

but your passion; it intimidates me and clouds my eyes.  

 

14. 

 

If the white turtle dove disdains its nest 

when the winter season ends, 

he leaves his little mate astounded,  

crying, missing her companion, 

 

she then moves her wings and to her partner’s side  

(for she wants to spend her whole life with him) 

she clings, and they help each other fly;  

thus their strength never tires; 

 

Like her, I am stunned, and I follow my beautiful desire 

if he goes away from me –  

he, my Angel of eternal hope, 

 

he is my beloved, and I know I am his –   

I would never fly to Heaven with another, 

for in him alone resides sweetness, and true virtue. 

 

 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  110 

28. 

 

At least you can bring your moist eyes  

and slow steps to the solitary fields, 

without your chest burning to keep the lips from their intention,  

so that the air is not imprinted with the sound of sighs, 

 

but on this crowded earth, where should I go 

to save myself from the gaze of idle people? 

For my wan eyes and lifeless face make clear  

how much I am feigning, and I flush. 

 

While caves, mountains, and beaches echo 

with your scattered, bitter-tempered odes; 

I laugh, and move none to pity. 

 

Even the wild souls of plants, 

sensing love, always honor it  

but plebeians who experience it only mock. 

 

46. (56.) 

 

Strong desire destroys Reason so much 

it leaves Man to his own devices: 

and so from you, even memory flees, 

since you forgot what I have promised you. 

 

Is the flame for you that burns me lessened now 

that I live with my soul so close to you? 

And may the burning heart’s roar not lessen 

now that some ice has been set on it? 

 

To make your beloved fall in love is the greatest good 

that makes a happy love life: 

to desire and hope for something else is illicit. 

 

A less graceful thought never originates in the mind, 

but in a heart emptied of honesty; 

compliant with neither pity nor courtesy. 

 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  111 

58. (69.) 

 

Did your promptly followed advice release me, O Love? 

Being faithful – what was it worth? 

If my pity, if other false voices,  

only trapped me, as prey in your fierce talon. 

 

But this pain no longer bewilders me, 

for you never cared for firmness 

as the sea never cared for the foam that salts the waves, 

or the whirlwind for the lily it tears from the field. 

 

Yet I will take the highest alpine path, 

and I will not leave the unstable waves, 

until I stop the errant Pilgrim, 

 

for I know well where he goes, and whence he comes, 

he, who guides my destiny; 

nothing is ever hidden from the eyes of Love. 

 

63. (74.) 

 

When I see you, when I think of you, oh how 

I am all alive in you and dead in me, 

life becomes uncertain, and I abandon 

the heavy burden of my pain. 

 

And now I reflect not on the face, nor the hair, 

nor the sweet gaze, nor the hand, 

but I ponder the divine beauty, and the sweet sound, 

that forms the honored name inside my heart. 

 

And beyond this earth, freed thoughts 

turn to contemplate him from whence 

one cannot go with mortal steps. 

 

My admiration is so great in these immortal pages 

that if my recitation did not contain fault 

I would amaze the world without art. 

 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  112 

66. (77.) 

 

Even if he kept his thoughts, kept his gaze fixed, 

invoking the counsel of intellect and art, 

Apelle himself only one part could depict  

of the beauty that has conquered my heart. 

 

Only I, thanks to his grace, can yearn 

to observe side to side the beauty of Paradise  

and faintly outline on the page the graceful ideal 

I saw within that eternal face. 

 

It’s one thing to see how the image shines in Heaven, 

another to see it encircled by us 

like the Sun by clouds, in a terrestrial veil; 

 

But not even you, my soul, can portray him 

for admiration freezes you 

just thinking about his eyes. 

 

67. (78.) 

 

The concepts that Simon colored with said style 

had humbler ambitions  

for he knew that his fine art could never acquire  

the inspiration of voice and intellect. 

 

And even if he could have placed within my chest 

that part, neither mortal nor base, 

the resemblance would have been poor 

and I would have been different from my true form. 

 

I live in your soul and ponder it 

and even if it is through my body that I speak, and listen, 

my senses do not reach my spirit. 

 

Do not envy Pygmalion, 

because into stone, into woman, and into many other forms, 

I am transformed against my will. 

 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  113 

73. (84.) 

 

If weeping can deaden you, o passionate heart, 

then we will cry: but if pain sustains  

the flames, crying is of just as much use 

as your engendering of error.  

 

At least, Love is vented through weeping, 

but the cries surge from within me, reaching my eyes; 

I, who am ever burning and bereft of hope 

because as soon as hope is born, it dies: 

 

so if we both have equal burdens, 

without hope, without the sight of the beloved 

why do we greedily keep hold of life? 

 

Because cruel Love, who troubles and grieves us, 

prevents our death; out of our uncommon pain, 

Love, the ingrate, acquires life. 

 

74. (85.) 

 

O cold fear, why do you still come 

After the night, to muddy my day, 

Oh why do I always turn and turn my mind 

to that thought which stabs my heart the most? 

 

I seem to hear the fleeting hour tell me: 

Your beloved, who is far from you, now goes  

To another beauty adorned with superior grace 

and so the one falls in love with the other 

 

and after staying together in contemplation, 

one stays, and so the other goes 

leaving that heart there which I yearn for and love in vain. 

 

O fierce desperation defeats me, 

and if Love lives well, hope is dead, 

because, more than life, I long for death.  

 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  114 

79. (90.) 

 

My desires were free, my thoughts were scattered 

Love had not yet trapped me in his web, 

he, whose fires burned inside many minds, 

had for me scarce effect. 

 

When within me a strange change took place 

and dying, I felt I was reborn, 

and that pleasure which I had never tasted 

I drank in through my eyes, and, astonished, I was burned, 

 

when you, who in appearance are much more than a mortal Man, 

assaulted me, armed with words 

for defeating beasts, not merely a human soul. 

 

And you assail me with the sweetness of your brow,  

the double suns that brand my heart, 

which neither art, nor time, can heal. 

 

85. (100.) 

 

When the dawn approaches the Sun can be seen 

turning from the first hour to survey the ninth; 

In the time when the wind is quiet,  

and the breeze caresses us more than it wounds; 

 

When the night sits in highest Heaven, 

and the soul reasons with ghosts, 

when for the Occasion – to awaken the pain of every person –   

evening rushes to its feet; 

 

I am always troubled by that fatal love, 

which brings to mind the manner, the place, the year, 

when, how, and where the wounds came to be. 

 

Oh sour memories that stick in my mind 

and lacerate my heart, 

which loves – betrayed again – those two dim lights. 

 

 

 

 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  115 

96. (116.) 

 

So alive is the pleasure, such is the sweetness 

my thoughts draw from your virtue, 

that I would contemplate forever  

your inner angelic beauty. 

 

And so accustomed is the soul to subsisting  

on the sweetest qualities of your virtue, 

its mind rapt, it despises  

every other good, every other care. 

 

Of circling round and round the divine ray, 

thoughts never tire, 

nor is Love sated, nor desire slowed. 

 

But happier I will be if shadows and stones 

do not deprive the eyes of the bright day, 

and my gaze could still be part of the good. 

 

99. (121.) 

 

The woman who is mistress of herself is not a slave to Love, 

and the man who cares not for a woman’s love does not risk his own. 

I know not for how long one can remain safe, 

who has for a habergeon only a fragile skirt,  

who wears as a helmet only a grass wreath; 

Whosoever was sure of her virtue, 

can tell of her defeat, and the wounds she maintains. 

I do not want to expose myself to that ungodly arrow, 

that stings me all the more when I struggle for revenge. 

 

109. (132.) 

 

I know Love is the cause of this delirium I feel: 

I know it is for him that I prepare to live 

like someone who slowly drinks a mortal poison, 

and dies without suffering death’s torment. 

 

I do not lament because of him, 

for torment is not worthy of him; 

it is only I who transform his good into bad, 

who freely consent to my worst. 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  116 

 

I want, even if my will pains me,  

I fear the peril of the afflicted boat, 

and I avoid the port, even forgetting how to steer. 

 

Even so, this weight, this burden of the spirit,  

I will carry as long as I am able,  

whether it be summer, spring, fall, or winter. 

 

195. (223.) 

 

Love kidnapped me from my dreams to his carriage, 

so high that the ground seemed black to me; 

and traversing the ether and the Moon, 

he urged the runners to a faster pace. 

 

Arriving in the highest skies, to the great lights I narrated 

my ardor and my pains, one by one, 

and with my feet at the threshold of Fortune, 

I spoke my defense to her, who listened. 

 

Moved to pity, “Let your pain be nothing,” 

she answered; and sent Dawn’s Messenger  

to awaken my gracious Sun. 

 

I emerge from sleep, and he who makes my heart rise, 

he, who livens my eyes with his eyes, 

Comes sweetly to serenade my soul. 

 

196. (224.) 

 

If in your presence I assume  

a pleased aspect, civil only to you; 

If my lights brighten with joy 

to see you wander the labyrinth with me; 

 

If, whenever you are near, I have painted 

love on my pupils, fixed and intent on you; 

If my cheeks, violated with blush, 

display the affection with which the heart is tainted; 

 

If at your parting what befalls me 

is what always happens to the Sun-following night: 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Briante, Lear & Pisacane 
 

6.1 (2019)  117 

You are the Sun of delight, and I the night of grief; 

 

If Love is close by in dreams and in waking, 

so that I always burn and all is torment, 

one shared cause has this ruin. 

 

198. (226.) 

 

I leave the roof, my home, without you, 

alone I flee to the wood I frequent, 

to press the footsteps I know by scent 

printed on my heart by my dear intent. 

 

My one delight has passed through here, 

that cave echoed his Tuscan meter, 

here by his bright eyes the dark was lightened, 

this sweet grass, those flowers, made him a bed. 

 

Compassionate Love meanwhile portrays 

your figure to me, to keep partially at bay 

that desire which keeps me in pain. 

 

Poor me! So far I went! My happiness relies  

on dreaming you in these lands,  

my only joy is this delirium 


	#LauraSpeaks: Remediations of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s “Risposte”
	Elisa Briante, Marena Lear, and Gerardo Pisacane
	Introduction
	1. Voicing Laura: Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Challenge
	1.1 Petrarca and Petrarchism in the Digital Era
	1.2 Pellegra Bongiovanni: Life and Works
	1.3 “Riposte di Madonna Laura”
	1.4 The Project #LauraSpeaks

	2. A Living Text: Pellegra Bongiovanni’s “Risposte” and Theories of Remediation
	2.1 Translation as Transformation
	2.2 A Digital Poetics
	2.3 Twitterature and the Digital Remediation of Bongiovanni

	3. Francesco, You’ve Got Mail – the Movie. Literary Criticism Through Cinema.
	3.1 Remediating Our Body with Cinema

	3.2 Immediacy of Francesco, You’ve Got Mail
	3.3 Hypermediacy of Francesco, You’ve Got Mail

	Project Conclusion
	Works Cited

	Appendix
	Translation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca, in nome della medesima


