Petrarch

Petrarch, born Francesco di Petracco, was an Italian poet and scholar of the 14th century who is often called the father of humanism. His search for lost classical texts, including letters of Cicero, helped launch the revival of ancient learning that grew into the Italian Renaissance, and his Italian love sonnets to a woman he called Laura became the model for lyric poetry across Europe. He spent his life moving between papal Avignon and the cities of northern Italy, and he was the first to describe the centuries before his own as an age of darkness.

Petrarch was born on 20 July 1304 in Arezzo, in Tuscany, the son of a notary, Ser Petracco, who was a friend of Dante. He spent his early childhood at Incisa, near Florence. In 1309 Pope Clement V moved the papal court to Avignon, beginning the Avignon Papacy, and Petrarch's family followed it to Avignon and nearby Carpentras. His father made him study law at Montpellier and Bologna from 1316 to 1326, years Petrarch later called wasted; he cared only for Latin literature, and his father once threw his books on the fire.

After his parents died, Petrarch returned to Avignon in 1326 and took minor church posts that left him time to write. On 6 April 1327, he later wrote, he first saw Laura in an Avignon church. She may have been Laura de Noves, a married woman, and the two had little or no personal contact, but she inspired most of his Italian poems. His Latin epic Africa, about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, made him famous, and on 8 April 1341 he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, only the second poet so honoured since antiquity.

In April 1336 he climbed Mont Ventoux simply for the pleasure of it, and his letter about the ascent, which ends with him turning from the landscape to reflect on his own soul, is often cited as an early sign of a new outlook. Through much of the 1340s and 1350s he made his home in a modest house at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, to the east of Avignon. He never married, as his church career did not permit it, but he fathered a son and a daughter, Francesca, whom he later legitimised.

Petrarch travelled widely, served as a diplomat and collected old Latin manuscripts wherever he went. In 1345, in the cathedral library of Verona, he found a collection of Cicero's letters to his friend Atticus that had been unknown. He encouraged a translation of Homer, though he could not read Greek himself. He wrote letters to long-dead writers such as Cicero and Virgil, essays on the solitary life and on fortune, and an imaginary dialogue with a figure modelled on Saint Augustine. Scorning what he saw as the ignorance of the centuries after Rome, he created the idea of the Dark Ages, which modern historians generally reject.

Laura died in 1348, and plague killed his son Giovanni in 1361. Petrarch spent his later years in northern Italy. From 1362 to 1367 he lived in Venice with his daughter's family, and the younger writer Boccaccio, his close friend and correspondent, visited him there and in Padua. Around 1368 he settled at Arquà, a village in the Euganean Hills close to Padua, and he died there on the night of 18 to 19 July 1374.

His Italian masterpiece, known as the Canzoniere or Songbook, gathers 366 poems, 317 of them sonnets, most addressed to Laura during her life and after her death. He refined the sonnet form he inherited, and the form is still called the Petrarchan sonnet after him. In the 16th century the scholar Pietro Bembo made Petrarch's language, with Boccaccio's, the model for literary Italian, and a wave of imitators known as Petrarchists, from Michelangelo to the English poets Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney, spread his style through Europe.

Our 1300 and 1400 maps show the patchwork of Italian states and papal lands through which he travelled, including the Republic of Venice, where he lived in the 1360s.