Sonnets and Canzones on Life and Death of Madonna Laura

Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) gained fame through the centuries with poems dedicated to his unquenchable love for the beautiful Laura. The author himself compiled them into a collection called «Canzoniere» («Book of Songs»). Created over many years, both during Laura's lifetime (a married lady) and after her death, the poems became a kind of diary, a fixation of feelings that overwhelmed a passionate, vain, intelligent, self-loving, whimsical, and sensitive— in short, a complexly composed person. And it is precisely the poetry, written in the living Italian language, rather than scholarly treatises in Latin that has preserved for us the name of Petrarch, his voice, individuality; it is in poetry that new generations of readers find the lines that resonate with them.