Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), known in English as Petrarch, was born in Arezzo to a Florentine notary exiled from his native city, and grew up in Avignon, then the seat of the papacy. He studied law at Montpellier and Bologna but gave himself to classical letters, recovering and copying Latin authors, and was crowned poet laureate on the Capitol in Rome in 1341. He spent his later years in northern Italy and died at Arquà, near Padua.

His Italian lyrics, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or Canzoniere, record his love for a woman named Laura, first seen in Avignon in 1327, whose death in 1348 divides the collection into poems written in her life and after her death. Their sonnet form and manner of address shaped European love poetry for centuries. The English versions here are from the 1879 Bohn volume, which prints several translations of most poems by different hands; the first version of each is given.