PETRARCH (1304-1374)• Francesco di Petracco (Fran cesco Petrarca), the great Italian poet and humanist, was born at Arezzo on July 20,1304. His father, Ser Petracco, held a post of notary in the Florentine Rolls court of the Rif ormagioni ; but, having espoused the same cause as Dante during the quarrels of the Blacks and Whites, Petracco was expelled from Florence by the decree of Jan. 27, 1302, which condemned Dante to lifelong exile. With his wife he took refuge in the Ghibelline township of Arezzo. His mother, having obtained permission to return from banishment, settled at Incisa, a little village above Florence, and here Petrarch acquired that pure Tuscan idiom which he used with such consummate mastery in ode and sonnet. In 1312 Petracco set up a house at Pisa; but he removed in 1313 to Avignon, where at that time the popes had their residence.
At Carpentras, under the direction of Convennole of Prato, Petrarch studied the humanities between 1315 and 1319, when he went to Montpellier to study law. Like Ovid and many other poets, Petrarch felt no inclination for law. There is an authentic story of Petracco's flinging the young student's books of poetry and rhetoric upon the fire, but saving Virgil and Cicero half burned from the flames at his son's passionate entreaties. Never theless, after four years of study at Montpellier, he passed three years at the law school of Bologna with his brother Gherardo. In 1326, when his father died, he returned to Avignon. Banishment and change of place had already diminished Petracco's fortune, which was never large ; and a fraudulent administration of his estate after his death left the two heirs almost destitute. The most precious remnant of Petrarch's inheritance was a ms. of Cicero. Petrarch took ecclesiastical orders and Giacomo Colonna, after wards bishop of Lombez, now befriended him and partly sup ported him for some years.
Laura.—On April 6, 1327, happened the most famous event of Petrarch's personal history. He saw Laura for the first time in the church of St. Clara at Avignon. Who Laura was remains un certain still. Petrarch kept the secret jealously, and the identi fication of her by the abbe de Sade in the 18th century with the wife of Hugues de Sade is more than suspect. We may, however, reject the sceptical hypothesis that Laura was a figment of Petrarch's fancy. If we accept her personal reality, the poems of
her lover demonstrate that she was a married woman who accepted the poet's homage, but refused intimate relations.
Petrarch's inner life after this date is mainly occupied with the passion which he celebrated in his Italian poems and with the friendships which his Latin epistles dimly reveal. Besides the bishop of Lombez he was now on terms of intimacy with another member of the great Colonna family, the cardinal Giovanni. A German, Ludwig, whom he called Socrates, and a Roman, Lello, who received from him the classic name of Laellius, were among his best-loved associates. He lived mainly at Avignon until 1333, when he undertook the first of many long journeys. He was a great traveller and keenly observant. He was one of the first alpinists and loved the mountains for their own sake. On this tour he visited Paris, Ghent, Liege, Cologne, making the acquaint ance of learned men and copying classical manuscripts. On his return to Avignon he pleaded the cause of the Scaligers in their lawsuit with the Rossi for the lordship of Parma, and addressed two poetical epistles to Benedict XII. upon the restoration of the papal see to Rome. His eloquence on behalf of the tyrants of VerOna won him the friendship of their ambassador, Azzo di Correggio. Not long after these events Petrarch made his first journey to Rome, a journey memorable from the account which he has left us of the impression he received from its ruins.
In 1337 Petrarch established himself at Vaucluse, and began his life of solitary study, heightened by communion with nature in her loneliest and wildest moods. Here he spent his time among books, meditating on Roman history, and preparing him self for the Latin epic on Scipio Africanus, Africa. For recreation he climbed the hills or traced the Sorgues from its fountain under those tall limestone cliffs, while odes and sonnets to Madonna Laura were committed to paper. He wrote many of his most important treatises in prose, as well as a large portion of his Latin correspondence, in this retreat. Some woman, unknown by name, made him the father of a son, Giovanni, in ; and she was probably the same who brought him a daughter, Francesca, in 1343. Both children were afterwards legitimized by papal bulls.