The Center for Italian Studies is proud to present the eighth annual Ravarino Lecture on March 26, 2026. This year's lecture will be delivered by Professor Simone Marchesi of Princeton University and is titled
Doomed Ships: Allegories of Shipwrecks in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio
The lecture offers an overview of a larger research project devoted to the interpretation of allegories of shipwreck in the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. It examines the literary representation of this traditional motif within classical and medieval Western textuality, with particular attention to its allegorical dimensions. Focusing on three case studies, the talk explores a series of widespread yet largely unnoticed allegorical redeployments of the topos. Drawing on fourteenth-century theological, ethical, and medical-psychological discourses, the lecture argues that early readers of the Three Crowns were familiar with a range of allegorical interpretations of navigational language far broader than the commonly studied associations with human existence, state politics, or literary composition alone.
Simone Marchesi is Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University. His main research area is the dialogue with classical and late-antique texts engaged by medieval Italian writers, especially Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Published work on medieval authors includes two monographs: Stratigrafie decameroniane (Olschki, 2004), Dante and Augustine: Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (UToronto Press, 2011), along with articles and chapters in collections. Recently, he has co-edited three collections of essays on Dante and Boccaccio: Dante Alive (Routledge, 2022); Decameron Day IX in Perspective (UToronto Press, 2022); and Boccaccio Today: Documenting, Interpreting, Responding, for the journal Letteratura Tardogotica e Quattrocentesca (2022-2023). Vernacular Edens, a monograph on the literary motif of the garden visit, constructed by late-medieval vernacular fiction writers as a trope for their acts of cultural translation, has recently been released by the University of Toronto Press. At the national level, he has served as Vice-President and President of the American Boccaccio Association, as well as Editor in Chief for the Electronic Bulletin of the Dante Society of America, now DanteNotes.
Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.