Francesco di Petracco entered the world on the 20th of July 1304 in the Tuscan city of Arezzo. His family moved to Incisa in Val d'Arno shortly after his birth before relocating to Avignon when Pope Clement V established the papal court there in 1309.
In 1345 Petrarch discovered a collection of Cicero's letters in the Chapter Library of Verona Cathedral. These Epistulae ad Atticum had never been known to exist before that moment and initiated what historians call the fourteenth-century Italian Renaissance.
On the 6th of April 1327 Petrarch saw a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon who may have been Laura de Noves wife of Count Hugues de Sade. Her death occurred in 1348 leaving the poet with grief difficult to live with which he channeled into love poems.
Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux with his brother and two servants for recreation rather than necessity. He undertook this ascent because no other recorded Alpinist had climbed a mountain merely for the delight of looking from its top during those centuries.
The collection contains 366 lyric poems known as the Canzoniere. Three hundred seventeen of them were sonnets bearing his name today.