Welcome to Daily TWiP, your daily dose of all the holidays and history we couldn’t cram into The Week in Preview.

Today (April 6th) in 1327, the Italian poet Petrarch began one of the most passionate one-sided love affairs in literary history when he met Laura (thought to be Laura de Noves), whose beauty inspired him to write the 366 poems in his Canzoniere.

In 1327, April 6th fell on Good Friday. Petrarch, who had recently left the priesthood, spied Laura while attending Mass in the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon and was instantly overwhelmed by her loveliness and her modest presence.

He apparently approached her to confess his affections, but she refused him as she was already married to Count Hugues de Sade (who is thought to be an ancestor of the infamous Marquis de Sade).

From this point forward, it’s unclear how much further contact Petrarch and Laura had. What is clear, however, is that Petrarch put his thoughts and feelings down on paper and spent the rest of his life writing and revising a collection of love poetry with Laura as his inspiration.

This collection was titled Il Canzoniere, which translates to “The Song Book,” and ultimately contained 366 poems, the majority of which are sonnets. While Laura is the focus of the poems, Petrarch also addresses other themes, including isolation, the passing of time, and his struggle to reconcile his Christian faith with his unfulfilled desires.

Petrarch produced other poetry as well as essays, letters, scholarly papers, even a travel guide to the Holy Land, but Il Canzoniere was a lifetime labor of love. He continued work on these poems even after Laura’s death in 1348, revising right up until his own death in 1374. Petrarch also featured Laura in his religious allegory, the Trionfi.

Although Petrarch’s Canzoniere doesn’t seem to have reached Laura, it has reached countless others. Sonnet authority Michael Spiller has described it as the single greatest influence on the love poetry of Renaissance Europe until well into the 17th century. Chaucer even incorporated part of the Canzoniere into the first book of Troilus and Criseyde.

Since it was written in vernacular Italian (rather than the more scholarly Latin Petrarch usually employed), the Canzoniere also helped establish Italian as a legitimate literary language. If you’ll pardon the pun, we can certainly understand why Italian is considered a Romance language.

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– Teresa Santoski