Francesco Petrarca

Francesco Petrarca was born in Arezzo, Italy, in 1304, the son of a Florentine notary exiled by the same political faction that had banished Dante. He grew up in Avignon, where the papal court had relocated, studied law at Montpellier and Bologna at his father's insistence, and abandoned it upon his father's death to pursue literature and classical scholarship. On April 6, 1327, he first saw the woman he called Laura in the Church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon, an encounter that would shape his poetry for the rest of his life. Petrarch took minor clerical orders, which provided him with income and freedom to travel, and he became the most celebrated intellectual in Europe, crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Petrarch's Songbook.