Francesco Petrarca

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian poet and scholar, often called the first humanist. Born in Arezzo to a Florentine exile, he grew up near Avignon, studied law at Montpellier and Bologna and took minor orders. In 1327 he saw the woman he called Laura, and the sonnets and songs he wrote to her for forty years, collected in the Canzoniere, fixed the forms of European love poetry for three centuries. He was crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341, searched out and copied the manuscripts of Cicero and Livy, climbed Mont Ventoux and died at Arqua near Padua.