| Summary: | Although we usually look for quotations in written texts, it is also worth considering that words can be 'stolen' from the conversational flux, from those oral exchanges which, at least in antiquity, were not recorded. This seems to be the case of two of the greatest fourteenth-century writers, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Their works, in which they quote from each other, seem also to trace their physical encounters, from the first in 1350 in Florence to the last in the summer of 1368 in Padua. More precisely, Petrarch and Boccaccio share a concern about the value and function of poetry, a genre they wanted to defend against detractors. The small literary thefts which may be identified result in the construction of no less than a new hermeneutic paradigm, of which we are still, perhaps, the distant heirs.
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