TWA Poet: Francesco Petrarch

It's the birthday of the Italian scholar and poet Petrarch, born Francesco Petrarca in Arezzo, Tuscany (1304). In 1327, in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon, he first saw a woman known only as "Laura." Over the course of 40 years, he wrote a series of poems about her that have come to be known as Petrarchan sonnets, poems of 14 lines divided by their r…