Quand'io son tutto vòlto in quella parte (Rvf 18)

Petrarch's sonnet "Quand'io son tutto vòlto in quella parte" (Rvf 18) is the only sonnet in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta whos rhymes are all rich (Italian "equivoche": the rhyming words are homonyms). The paper shows that this fact has to be referred to the macro-textual strcuture of the "Canzoniere": since the sonnet is part of a series of 21 texts with the same lenght, and the first different poem is a sestine, "Quand'io son tutto vòlto" ha sto be considered as a sort of variation of the sonnet form, which introduces readers to the sestine itself. Then the essay focuses on the exegetical issues of the text: in the last decades scholars have asserted that its topic are the scocking effects of contemplating Laura; but it is not less likely (and not less controversial) that the poem is about the absence of the woman and, so to say, the inner vision of her "figura" instead of her "persona", as we can see in some thirteenth-century and especially stilnovistic poems. The sonnet is therefore ambiguous in itself, and this fact seems to be confirmed by the relations with the sorrounding sonnets.