[2] In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio, and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri.

On 8 April 1341, he became the second[7] poet laureate since classical antiquity and was crowned by Roman Senatori Giordano Orsini and Orso dell'Anguillara on the holy grounds of Rome's Capitol.

[15] Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited with creating the concept of a historical "Dark Ages",[4] which most modern scholars now find inaccurate and misleading.

In it, Petrarch claimed to have been inspired by Philip V of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemo and that an aged peasant had told him that nobody had ascended Ventoux before or after himself, 50 years earlier, and warned him against attempting to do so.

The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt noted that Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and ascents accomplished during the Middle Ages have been recorded, including that of Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne.

[20][21] Scholars[22] note that Petrarch's letter[23][24] to Dionigi displays a strikingly "modern" attitude of aesthetic gratification in the grandeur of the scenery and is still often cited in books and journals devoted to the sport of mountaineering.

In Petrarch, this attitude is coupled with an aspiration for a virtuous Christian life, and on reaching the summit, he took from his pocket a volume by his beloved mentor, Saint Augustine, that he always carried with him.

[26] As the book fell open, Petrarch's eyes were immediately drawn to the following words: And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

... How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation[23]James Hillman argues that this rediscovery of the inner world is the real significance of the Ventoux event.

About 1368 Petrarch and Francesca (with her family) moved to the small town of Arquà in the Euganean Hills near Padua, where he passed his remaining years in religious contemplation.

[29] On the marble slab, there is a Latin inscription written by Antonio Quarenghi: Etruscus gemino vates ardebat amore: Maximus ignis ego; Laura secundus erat.

Arcebam sacro vivens a limine mures, Ne domini exitio scripta diserta forent; Incutio trepidis eadem defuncta pavorem, Et viget exanimi in corpore prisca fides.

The Tuscan bard of deathless fame Nursed in his breast a double flame, Unequally divided; And when I say I had his heart, While Laura play'd the second part, I must not be derided.

[30] Petrarch's will (dated 4 April 1370) leaves fifty florins to Boccaccio "to buy a warm winter dressing gown"; various legacies (a horse, a silver cup, a lute, a Madonna) to his brother and his friends; his house in Vaucluse to its caretaker; money for Masses offered for his soul, and money for the poor; and the bulk of his estate to his son-in-law, Francescuolo da Brossano, who is to give half of it to "the person to whom, as he knows, I wish it to go"; presumably his daughter, Francesca, Brossano's wife.

On 6 April 1327,[40] after Petrarch gave up his vocation as a priest, the sight of a woman called "Laura" in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta ("Fragments of Vernacular Matters").

Her presence causes him unspeakable joy, but his unrequited love creates unendurable desires, inner conflicts between the ardent lover and the mystic Christian, making it impossible to reconcile the two.

Petrarch's quest for love leads to hopelessness and irreconcilable anguish, as he expresses in the series of paradoxes in Rima 134 "Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra;/e temo, et spero; et ardo, et son un ghiaccio": "I find no peace, and yet I make no war:/and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice".

Aura che quelle chiome bionde et crespe cercondi et movi, et se’ mossa da loro, soavemente, et spargi quel dolce oro, et poi ’l raccogli, e ’n bei nodi il rincrespe,

Aër felice, col bel vivo raggio rimanti; et tu corrente et chiaro gorgo, ché non poss’io cangiar teco vïaggio?

you linger around bright eyes whose loving sting pierces me so, till I feel it and weep, and I wander searching for my treasure, like a creature that often shies and kicks:

In spite of the metaphysical subject, the Commedia is deeply rooted in the cultural and social milieu of turn-of-the-century Florence: Dante's rise to power (1300) and exile (1302); his political passions call for a "violent" use of language, where he uses all the registers, from low and trivial to sublime and philosophical.

[45] Petrarch polished and perfected the sonnet form inherited from Giacomo da Lentini and which Dante widely used in his Vita nuova to popularise the new courtly love of the Dolce Stil Novo.

Petrarch was a devout Catholic and did not see a conflict between realizing humanity's potential and having religious faith, although many philosophers and scholars have styled him a Proto-Protestant who challenged the Pope's dogma.

In a clear disagreement with Dante, in 1346 Petrarch argued in De vita solitaria that Pope Celestine V's refusal of the papacy in 1294 was a virtuous example of solitary life.

As a result, a number of political, military, and religious leaders during the Renaissance were inculcated with the notion that their pursuit of personal fulfillment should be grounded in classical example and philosophical contemplation.

[59] The Romantic composer Franz Liszt set three of Petrarch's Sonnets (47, 104, and 123) to music for voice, Tre sonetti del Petrarca, which he later would transcribe for solo piano for inclusion in the suite Années de Pèlerinage.

While in Avignon in 1991, Modernist composer Elliott Carter completed his solo flute piece Scrivo in Vento which is in part inspired by and structured by Petrarch's Sonnet 212, Beato in sogno.

[60] In 2004, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho crafted a miniature for solo piccolo flute titled Dolce tormento,[61] in which the flutist whispers fragments of Petrarch's Sonnet 132 into the instrument.

[62] In November 2003, it was announced that pathological anatomists would be exhuming Petrarch's body from his casket in Arquà Petrarca, to verify 19th-century reports that he had stood 1.83 meters (about six feet), which would have been tall for his period.

He described visiting Rome and asking peasants to bring him ancient coins they would find in the soil which he would buy from them, and writes of his delight at being able to identify the names and features of Roman emperors.