Sonnets and Canzoni on the Life and Death of Madonna Laura

Francesco Petrarca (1304 — 1374) became renowned through the ages for his verses dedicated to his insatiable 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 life (a married lady) and after her death, the poems became a kind of diary, a fixation of the feelings that overwhelmed this passionate and vain, intelligent and self-loving, capricious and sensitive — in a word, a complex individual. And it is exactly poetry, written in the lively Italian language rather than scholarly treatises in Latin, that has preserved for us Petrarch's name, his voice, his individuality; it is precisely in poetry that new generations of readers find lines that resonate with them.