Petrarch's vernacular love poems to 'Laura,' collected in his Canzoniere, refined the sonnet form and influenced European poetry for centuries. Beyond poetry, his passionate rediscovery and cataloguing of ancient Roman manuscripts earned him recognition as the 'father of Humanism,' a movement that reoriented European intellectual life toward classical antiquity and helped ignite the Renaissance.
Petrarch was born in exile. His father, a lawyer allied with Dante's political faction, had been expelled from Florence, and Francesco entered the world in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, one stop in a peripatetic childhood that eventually settled the family in Avignon, France, then the seat of the Papacy.
He trained as a lawyer to please his father but abandoned the profession the moment his father died, devoting himself instead to literature and, obsessively, to hunting down forgotten manuscripts of Cicero, Livy, and other Roman authors moldering in monastery libraries across Europe. His discovery of Cicero's letters in Verona in 1345 was treated by contemporaries as a literary event on the scale of an archaeological find.
But Petrarch's most enduring legacy came from a woman he may have only glimpsed a handful of times: Laura, whom he first saw in a church in Avignon in 1327 and who became the subject of 366 poems collected in his Canzoniere. His refinement of the 14-line sonnet form—an octave and sestet turning on a volta, a pivot of thought—became the template that Renaissance poets across Europe, including Shakespeare a quarter millennium later, would adapt and reinvent.