Francesco Petrarca - Piazza Petrarca, Padova, Italy - Dead Poets' Society Memorials on Waymarking.com

The sandstone statue of Francesco Petrarca on the square named for him, Piazza Petrarca, in Padova was inaugurated here on July 19, 1874 and it made by Luigi Ceccon. Francesco Petrarca spent last years of his life in a small towns near Padova. The over-life size statue (about 3 meters high) is standing on a prismatic pedestal of a similar height. Around the pedestal ther a few sandstone steps. On the front side of the pedestal there is a sign "A Petrarca / Cinque secoli dopo la sua morte / Padova -- XVIII LUGLIO MDCCCLXXIV", i.e. "To Petrarca / five centuries after his death / Padova July 19, 1874". At the sides of the menoment there are three medailon of Petrarca's friends - Cola di Rienzo, Iacopo da Carrara and Laura di Noves. Francesco Petrarce is depicted as a medieval scholar, wearing a long cloak and a hood on his head. He holds a piece of paper. At his feet a scroll is lying.

Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)

Italian scholar, poet, and humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. Petrarch’s inquiring mind and love of Classical authors led him to travel, visiting men of learning and searching monastic libraries for Classical manuscripts. He was regarded as the greatest scholar of his age.

Petrarca's Writing

His first pieces were poems that he composed after the death of his mother. He would go on to write sonnets, letters, histories and more. Petrarch's writing was greatly admired during his lifetime, and he was crowned Rome's poet laureate in 1341. The work Petrarch held in highest regard was his Latin composition Africa, an epic poem about the Second Punic War. His vernacular poems achieved greater renown, however, and would later be used to help create the modern Italian language.

Petrarch's most well-known vernacular compositions were lyrical poems about Laura, a woman he had fallen in unrequited love with after seeing her in an Avignon church on April 6, 1327. Petrarch wrote about Laura—whose true identity has never been verified—for most of his life, even after she died during the Black Death of 1348. When he collected 366 of his vernacular poems in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta—also known as Rime Sparse ("Scattered Rhymes") and as Petrarch's canzoniere ("Petrarch's songbook")—his love for Laura was one of the main themes. The collection also contains 317 sonnets; Petrarch was an early practitioner of the form and helped to popularize it.

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