petrarch

Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love.

The (European) Renaissance took two-three centuries - from Petrarch and Giotto to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

Tuscan was the written standard for Italian since Petrarch and the Piedmontese conquest of Southern Italy was done by 1871.

For example, Petrarch didn't just have a nostalgic relationship with Cicero's works.

Works were preserved, but they often didn’t circulate, to the extent that in the 14th century, Petrarch was able to discover a lost letter of Cicero.

Scholars in the High Middle Ages like Petrarch could look back on their own recent history, and then a vast gap of mostly unknown, and then the impressive cultures of Antiquity among whose ruins they lived.

> They're called the dark ages because some humanists, full of themselves, started calling themselves the enlightenment I'd note that Petrarch (quoted in the link you posted!) was talking about the times he lived in himself as dark, and was far from claiming to be any sort of enlightenment.

The guy who invented the term "Dark Ages" was Petrarch, and he certainly didn't mean that the amount of primary sources had decreased significantly.

Maybe Petrarch, the guy who first called the Dark Aages "dark", played a big role in ending them.

If you really want to piss them off try "ah, plutarch, petrarch, whats the difference anyway".

The term "dark ages" was coined by Petrarch with an explicitly negative connotation.

Petrarch book shows the start of the Renaissance and how current human thought can add to secular knowledge.

You can troll people with Petrarch, many say he's the first Renaissance dude so he doesn't count.

In his day, Poggio, like Petrarch, was famous for the elegant beauty of his penmanship.