82 Petrarch at the Banquet 



Petrarch arrived at Pavia, then, where he was doubtless 

 the guest of Galeazzo at the Castle, two or three days after 



had, he tells his friend, erected at Pavia a marble memorial to the child 

 on which six elegiac distichs of his own composition were inscribed in 

 golden letters — a thing which he would hardly have done, he says, for 

 any one else ('Bustum ego marmoreum illi infantulo, apud Ticini urbem, 

 bis sex elegis inscriptum, literisque aureis exaratum statui, quod vix alteri 

 facerem, et mihi ab altero fieri nollem. . . . Hoc ultimum et inane 

 tribuerim obsequii genus; et si non sibi utile, gratum mihi, hoc illi 

 igitur sacrum volui, non causam lachrymis, ut Maro ait, sed memoriae, 

 non tam meae, cui nee saxo nee carmine opus erat, quam eorum quos 

 illuc casus attulerit, ut sciant quantam ille suis ab ipso vitae principio 

 charus fuit'). 



These lines have fortunately been preserved. The memorial was erected 

 in the church of San Zeno (one of the loi churches standing in 1320 within 

 the walls of Pavia, a city which now boasts something like 30,000 inhabi- 

 tants; see Rer. Ital. Script. 11. 9), which was suppressed in 1789. Thence 

 it found its way to the collection of Marquis Luigi Malaspina di Sannazaro 

 (Fracassetti 2. 262), who published the verses (p. 43) in his collection of 

 lapidary inscriptions {Ucrxzioni Lapidarie, in two parts, Milan, 1830-32, 

 folio; cf. Giovanni Voghera, Tav. XIII of his Antichitd Pavesi, Fasc. 1-16, 

 Pavia, 1827, folio), and is now preserved on the wall of the staircase of 

 the Museo Civico, which was formerly the Palazzo Malaspina (Baedeker, 

 Oberitalien, i8th ed., Leipzig, 191 1, p. 199; but G. Natali, Pavia, pp. 136 

 ff., says that the Palazzo Malaspina is on the site of San Zeno, and next 

 door to the Museo Civico), in the immediate vicinity of the former church 

 (there is a Vicolo San Zeno near, with a bust of Boethius, on the spot 

 where his prison is supposed to have stood). The date is 'MCCCLXVIII, 

 XIV. Kal. lunias, hora IX' (Fracassetti 2. 262), and the child is described 

 as 'pulcher et innocens.' The inscription is in a square Gothic character. 

 A copy of the verses, in Roman letters, is also to be found, without the 

 date, in the lower cloister of the Cathedral of Treviso, where Francesca, 

 the child's mother, died on Aug. 2, 1382 (Poesie Minori, p. 67). There 

 are slight differences between the two inscriptions, that at Treviso having 

 been evidently made from the earlier one at Pavia. The Pavian copy 

 follows (from Rossetti, App. i, Epigraphe 4; see also Mezieres, pp. 

 166-7; Fracassetti 2. 262; De Sade, pp. 723-4; Magenta i. 133, note 2), 

 with the variants of the Trevisan : 



Vix mundi novus hospes iter [eram], vitaeque volantis 



Attigeram tenero limina dura pede. 

 Franciscus genitor, genetrix Francisca; secutus 



Hos, de fonte sacro nomen idem tenui. 

 Infans formosus, solamen dulce parentum, 



Nunc [Hinc] dolor; hoc uno sors mea laeta minus: 

 Csetera sum felix, et verae gaudia vitae 



Nactus et aeternae, tam cito, tam facile. 



