Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca was born in 1304 at Arezzo, the son of a notary exiled from Florence, and grew up at Avignon in France. On 6 April 1327, in a church at Avignon, he first saw a woman named Laura, and over the next twenty-one years wrote hundreds of poems to her, continuing even after she died of the Black Death. He searched monastery libraries for ancient manuscripts and discovered Cicero's lost letters, and is called the father of humanism. In 1341 he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitol in Rome. His sonnets shaped European lyric poetry for centuries.