Status Updates From Petrarch (Past Masters)

"the whole corpus of Petrarch's writing constitutes a vast, diffuse and constantly evolving portrait of the self, not exactly idealised, but seen through so many different prisms as to become almost kaleidoscopic."

"The Canzoniere is as much about poetry, and the process of writing poetry, as it is about a love-affair, a spiritual crisis and the ironies of the human condition."