Petrarch, for example, devoted much time to his Africa, a dactylic hexameter epic on Scipio Africanus, but this work was unappreciated in his time and remains little read today.

The meeting between the two was extremely fruitful and they were friends from then on, Boccaccio calling Petrarch his teacher and magister.

They met again in Padua in 1351, Boccaccio on an official mission to invite Petrarch to take a chair at the university in Florence.

He did not undertake further missions for Florence until 1365, and traveled to Naples and then on to Padua and Venice, where he met up with Petrarch in grand style at Palazzo Molina, Petrarch's residence as well as the place of Petrarch's library.

Petrarch describes how Pietro Petrone ( a Carthusian monk ) on Boccaccio's death bed sent another Carthusian ( Gioacchino Ciani ) to urge him to renounce his worldly studies.

* The purists, headed by Venetian Pietro Bembo ( who, in his Gli Asolani, claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and some part of Boccaccio ).

The relationship between the two forms is most obvious in the composers who concentrated on sacred music, especially Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose " motets " setting texts from the Canticum Canticorum, the biblical " Song of Solomon ," are among the most lush and madrigal-like of Palestrina's compositions, while his " madrigals " that set poems of Petrarch in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary would not be out of place in church.

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.

There is psychological realism in the description of Laura, although Petrarch draws heavily on conventionalised descriptions of love and lovers from troubadour songs and other literature of courtly love.

Statue of Petrarch on the Uffizi Palace, in FlorencePetrarch is traditionally called the father of Humanism and considered by many to be the " father of the Renaissance.

Continued troubles in Italy, as well as pleas from figures such as Petrarch and St. Bridget of Sweden, caused Urban to set out for Rome, which he reached on 16 October 1367.

As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch, the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform.

The modern Italian of Risorgimento patriots like Alessandro Manzoni was based on the Tuscan dialects sanctified by Dante and Petrarch.

Other poets on the continent cultivated the sestina during the 13 – 15th centuries, including Dante and Petrarch in Italy, and Luís de Camões in Portugal.

An admiring correspondent of Petrarch, he spent much of his salary on amassing a collection of 800 books, the largest library in Florence at the time.

His contributions to the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review, his dissertations in Italian on the text of Dante and Boccaccio, and still more his English essays on Petrarch, of which the value was enhanced by Lady Dacre's admirable translations of some of Petrarch ’ s finest sonnets, heightened his previous fame as a man of letters.

In it, Sidney partially nativised the key features of his Italian model, Petrarch: variation of emotion from poem to poem, with the attendant sense of an ongoing, but partly obscure, narrative ; the philosophical trappings ; the musings on the act of poetic creation itself.

Jean Buridan climbed the mountain early in the fourteenth century ; Petrarch ( accompanied by his brother ) repeated the feat on April 26, 1336, and claimed to have been the first to climb the mountain since antiquity.

Rore chose not to write madrigals of frivolous nature, preferring to focus on serious subject matter, including the works of Petrarch, and tragedies presented at Ferrara.

Poet and literary theorist Pietro Bembo edited an edition of Petrarch, the great 14th century poet, in 1501, and later published his theories on how contemporary poets could attain excellence by imitating Petrarch, and by being carefully attentive to the exact sounds of words, as well as their positioning within lines.

On April 6, 1327, Good Friday, 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 Rime sparse (" Scattered rhymes ").

* April 26 – Ascent of Mount Ventoux by the Italian poet Petrarch: he claims to be the first since classical antiquity to climb a mountain for the view.

* April 6 – Petrarch sees a woman he names Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d ' Avignon, which awakes in him a lasting passion.

Petrarch is a crater on Mercury at latitude-30, longitude 26. 5.

* 1336 – Francesco Petrarca ( Petrarch ) ascends Mont Ventoux.

The Italian scholar and poet Petrarch is credited with being the pursuit's first and most famous aficionado.

In 1359 following a meeting with Pope Innocent VI and further meetings with Petrarch it is probable that Boccaccio took some kind of religious mantle.

Boccaccio's change in writing style in the 1350s was not due just to meeting with Petrarch.

* Chaucer coming in contact with Petrarch or Boccaccio

By the 14th century, the form further crystallized under the pen of Petrarch, whose sonnets were later translated in the 16th century by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who is credited with introducing the sonnet form into English literature.

Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the centuries preceding the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited with creating the concept of a historical " Dark Ages ".

Francesca and her family lived with Petrarch in Venice for five years from 1362 to 1367 at Palazzo Molina ; although Petrarch continued to travel in those years.

About 1368 Petrarch and his daughter 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.

Later in his " Letter to Posterity ", Petrarch wrote: " In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames.

For example, Petrarch struggled with the proper relation between the active and contemplative life, and tended to emphasize the importance of solitude and study.

* The poet Petrarch coins the term Dark Ages to describe the preceding 900 years in Europe, beginning with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 through to the renewal embodied in the Renaissance.

Petrarch, who wrote in a letter that he was often approached by vinediggers with old coins asking him to buy or to identify the ruler, is credited as the first Renaissance collector.

Having virtually abandoned all the Imperial rights in Italy, the emperor re-crossed the Alps, pursued by the scornful words of Petrarch, but laden with considerable wealth.

He corresponded with Petrarch and invited this to visit his residence in Prague, whilst the Italian hoped — to no avail — to see Charles move his residence to Rome and reawaken tradition of the Roman Empire.

Despite the split, Naples grew in importance, attracting Pisan and Genoese merchants, Tuscan bankers, and with them some of the most championed Renaissance artists of the time, such as Boccaccio, Petrarch and Giotto.

The foundation of Bruni's conception can be found with Petrarch, who distinguished the classical period from later cultural decline, or tenebrae ( literally " darkness ").

Petrarch popularized the sonnet as a poetic form ; Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron made romance acceptable in prose as well as poetry ; François Rabelais rejuvenates satire with Gargantua and Pantagruel ; Michel de Montaigne single-handedly invented the essay and used it to catalog his life and ideas.