Francesco Petrarca

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, lyric poet, and humanist whose rediscovery of Cicero's letters is credited with initiating the fourteenth-century Renaissance. Born in Arezzo, he was educated in law at Montpellier and Bologna before taking minor holy orders and traveling widely across Europe in search of lost classical manuscripts.

Petrarch was crowned Poet Laureate on the Capitoline Hill in Rome in 1341, the first person to receive this honor since antiquity. While he considered his Latin epic Africa his monumental endeavor, his immortality rests on his vernacular lyric sequence, the Canzoniere (Rime Sparse), consisting of 366 poems primarily dedicated to his unattainable muse, Laura. His introspective mastery perfected the fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet, shaping Western lyric poetry for centuries.