Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), known in English as Petrarch, was born at Arezzo, grew up near the papal court at Avignon, and became the most celebrated scholar-poet of his century. Crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341, he recovered lost works of Cicero, championed the study of the classics within a Christian frame, and is called the father of humanism. His Italian lyrics to Laura made the sonnet the great love form of Europe.
The Canzoniere, which Petrarch himself titled Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragments in the vernacular, is a sequence of 366 Italian poems, chiefly sonnets with canzoni, sestinas, ballate and madrigals, that he collected, revised and arranged over some forty years until his death in 1374. Its subject is his love for Laura, a woman he says he first saw in the church of Saint Clare at Avignon on Good Friday, 6 April 1327, and who died on the same date in 1348, probably of the plague.