Ambiguità e dissimulazione nella canzone «Mai non vo' più cantar com'io soleva» di Petrarca (Rvf 105)

The song Mai non vo' più cantar com io soleva (Rvf 105) remains the most difficult text in Petrarch's entire Canzoniere, and also the least cited and studied among the extended texts. The article proposes an overall interpretation, which focuses on the idea of multiple levels of meaning, to be related to the taste for the aequivocatio proper to the hermetic strand of thirteenth-century lyric poetry and akin to the genre of the frottola, to which the song has already been compared by Pietro Bembo. The analysis is completed by a contextualisation within the autobiographical narration.