Italian · 1304–1374
Francesco Petrarca climbed Mont Ventoux in 1336, opened Augustine's Confessions at the summit, and wrote a letter about it that historians still use to date the beginning of the Renaissance. He hunted down lost classical manuscripts across Europe, found Cicero's letters to Atticus in a Verona chapter library, and wrote his own letters to Cicero, Homer and Livy as though they might answer. The Church paid him a canon's income; he spent it on books. In 1341 the city of Rome crowned him poet laureate on the Capitoline, the first since antiquity. He thought his Latin epic Africa would carry his name. Instead it was the 366 Italian poems he kept revising for forty years, addressed to a woman named Laura whom he saw in an Avignon church in 1327 and who died of plague in 1348. Every love sonnet in English descends from them.