Petrarch 1304 – 1374

Francesco Petrarch was an Italian scholar, poet, and one of the founders of Renaissance humanism. His rediscovery of a lost cache of Cicero's letters at Verona helped to inaugurate the recovery of classical literature, and his Latin works Africa, On the Solitary Life, and the Secretum, an interior dialogue with Augustine, articulated a new vision of the examined human life. The Italian Canzoniere, three hundred sixty-six lyric poems addressed to his beloved Laura, shaped European poetry for centuries. He coined the term Dark Ages to describe the centuries between classical antiquity and his own.