Following the path of Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, the ‘Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia’ supervised by Apostolo Zeno aimed at a canonization of the lyrical tradition from Petrarch to Tasso to restore the nobility and credibility of Italian poetry after the eccessi of the Baroque. Analysing how the journal dealt with recently published books on Petrarch and its imitators, the paper aims to illustrate an important episode of their early 18th-century reception, which was to have a major influence in the development of criticism of Italian lyric poetry.