Petrarch was an Italian writer and poet from the 1300s, a contemporary of Boccaccio, and apparently was used as a basis for standardizing the language that would become modern Italian, done by Pietro Bembo, who was also the lover of Lucrezia Borgia. The more you know.

This particular collection of his work is tiny. It includes two essays and snippets of his poetry. The poetry is very good considering it is a translation and several hundred years old. It is filled with the melancholy ache of unrequited love and the grief that follows the death of the object of his infatuation, Laura. I think that it would probably have been much more beautiful and poetic in its original language, but there were several portions of the poems that stuck out to me as particularly lovely.