Page "Petrarch" Paragraph 7

Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and counted Boccaccio among his notable friends to whom he wrote often.

After the death of their parents, Petrarch and his brother Gherardo went back to Avignon in 1326, where he worked in numerous clerical offices.

This work gave him much time to devote to his writing.

With his first large scale work, Africa, an epic in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity.

On April 8, 1341, he became the first poet laureate since antiquity and was crowned on the holy grounds of Rome's Capitol.