The 14th century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch left hundreds of letters detailing his life and thoughts. Now scientists plan to dig up his remains to find out more about his flesh and bones.

Of all the world’s great writers, Petrarch is the best known for losing his head. On Good Friday in 1327, the then 23-year-old writer and scholar fell madly — and forlornly — in love with a woman he ...

Studies of classical and Renaissance mnemontechnic arts demonstrate that memoria functioned as a poetics or art of poetry. The active processes of dividing, composing, reordering, and collecting ...

Six hundred years ago, on the 20th of July, 1304, a little Florentine baby was born into exile in a house on Via deli’ Orto in Arezzo, whither his father, banished from Florence, had fled. Civil war ...

In the first part of this paper I briefly outline the hitherto unstudied literary history of quotations from troubadour songs. In the second, I describe how quotation, despite or rather because of the ...

All 366 of the Canzoniere are available in The Poetry of Petrarch, an English-only edition by poet and translator David Young (At the White Window), who also introduces the book. Petrarch (1304-1374) ...

“ You will perhaps have heard something of me ; though who can tell whether so trivial and obscure a name as mine will have penetrated to remote places and distant times ? But if so, you may desire to ...

Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, is one of the tre corone – the ‘three crowns’ – of early Italian literature. There was a brief period when all three were alive: Dante died in 1321, ...

A scientific team that had been hoping to reconstruct the features of the great Italian poet Petrarch by digging up his bones has confirmed that the skull found in his tomb is not his. Instead, the ...

In 1533 a French poet called Maurice Scève, a disciple of Petrarch, announced that he had discovered Laura’s tomb in Avignon. It was unmarked but allegedly contained a casket in which were found a ...