FRANCESCO PETRARCA, LAURA & 'IL CANZIONERE'

Francesco Petrarca

Today, Jordi Santanyí and his friends are still in Arezzo. They want to visit the Francesco Petrarca's house, where this genius, father of Renaissance, was born and where the artistic and literary heritage of the Petrarchan Academy is kept in. Nowadays, this building is owned by the Accademia Petrarca di Lettere Arti e Scienze di Arezzo, established in 1623. It dates back to the XVI century and was built on top of a previous building of the XIII-XIV centuries.

The library has got about 20.000 books and incunabula, some of which date back to the XVI, XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. Among them there are valuable editions of some Petrarchan works and some antique books, including some works by F. Redi, a doctor, literary man and naturalist from Arezzo, who lived in the XVII century (1626-1697).

All the books dating back to the XV-XVIII centuries were collected by F.Redi himself and his successors until 1820 when they were inherited by the Petrachan Academy.

As well as the Redi Library, the Academy owns important collections of books including G. L. Passerini’s Dante’s Library and  valuable collection of letters, about 8000, belonging to the most well-known literary representatives of the Italian culture of the first three decades of the XX century.

Jordi and The Grandma love Literature and visiting Petrarca's home is an unforgettable experience for them. Jordi wants to know more things about Petrarca's life and The Grandma is interested in the mysterious figure of Laura, the secret love of the Tuscan writer.

Francesco Petrarca (July 20, 1304-July 18/19, 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch was a scholar and poet of Renaissance who was one of the earliest humanists. His rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited with inventing the 14th-century Renaissance.

Petrarch is often considered the founder of Humanism. In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio, and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri.

Jordi visits La Casa di Petrarca, Arezzo

Petrarch would be later endorsed as a model for Italian style by the Accademia della Crusca.

Petrarch's sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. He is also known for being the first to develop the concept of the Dark Ages.

Petrarch was born in the Tuscan city of Arezzo in 1304. He was the son of Ser Petracco and his wife Eletta Canigiani. His given name was Francesco Petracco. The name was Latinized to Petrarca. Petrarch's younger brother was born in Incisa in Val d'Arno in 1307. Dante was a friend of his father.

Petrarch spent his early childhood in the village of Incisa, near Florence. He spent much of his early life at Avignon and nearby Carpentras, where his family moved to follow Pope Clement V who moved there in 1309 to begin the Avignon Papacy. He studied law at the University of Montpellier (1316–20) and Bologna (1320–23) with a lifelong friend and schoolmate called Guido Sette. Because his father was in the legal profession, a notary, he insisted that Petrarch and his brother study law also.

More information: Ibelcasentino

Petrarch however, was primarily interested in writing and Latin literature and considered these seven years wasted. Additionally, he proclaimed that through legal manipulation his guardians robbed him of his small property inheritance in Florence, which only reinforced his dislike for the legal system. He protested, I couldn't face making a merchandise of my mind, as he viewed the legal system as the art of selling justice.

Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and counted Boccaccio among his notable friends to whom he wrote often. After the death of their parents, Petrarch and his brother Gherardo went back to Avignon in 1326, where he worked in numerous clerical offices. This work gave him much time to devote to his writing. With his first large-scale work, Africa, an epic in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity.

On April 8, 1341, he became the second poet laureate since antiquity and was crowned by Roman Senatori Giordano Orsini and Orso dell'Anguillara on the holy grounds of Rome's Capitol.

The Grandma & Claire inside La Casa di Petrarca

He traveled widely in Europe, served as an ambassador, and has been called the first tourist because he traveled just for pleasure, and the reason he climbed Mont Ventoux. During his travels, he collected crumbling Latin manuscripts and was a prime mover in the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece.

Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the centuries preceding the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited or charged with creating the concept of a historical Dark Ages.

Petrarch spent the later part of his life journeying through northern Italy as an international scholar and poet-diplomat. His career in the Church did not allow him to marry, but he is believed to have fathered two children by a woman or women unknown to posterity.

About 1368 Petrarch moved to the small town of Arquà in the Euganean Hills near Padua, where he passed his remaining years in religious contemplation. He died in his house in Arquà early on July 20, 1374 -his seventieth birthday. The house hosts now a permanent exhibition of Petrarchian works and curiosities; among others you find the famous tomb of Petrarch's beloved cat who was embalmed.

More information: The New York Times

Petrarch is best known for his Italian poetry, notably the Canzoniere and the Trionfi. However, Petrarch was an enthusiastic Latin scholar and did most of his writing in this language. His Latin writings include scholarly works, introspective essays, letters, and more poetry.

Among them are Secretum Meum, an intensely personal, guilt-ridden imaginary dialogue with Augustine of Hippo; De Viris Illustribus, a series of moral biographies; Rerum Memorandarum Libri, an incomplete treatise on the cardinal virtues; De Otio Religiosorum and De Vita Solitaria, which praise the contemplative life; De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae, a self-help book which remained popular for hundreds of years; Itinerarium; invectives against opponents such as doctors, scholastics, and the French; the Carmen Bucolicum, a collection of 12 pastoral poems; and the unfinished epic Africa. He translated seven psalms, a collection known as the Penitential Psalms.

Joseph visits La Casa di Petrarca, Arezzo

Petrarch also published many volumes of his letters, including a few written to his long-dead friends from history such as Cicero and Virgil. Cicero, Virgil, and Seneca were his literary models. Most of his Latin writings are difficult to find today, but several of his works are available in English translations.

Petrarch collected his letters into two major sets of books called Epistolae familiares and Seniles, both of which are available in English translation. The plan for his letters was suggested to him by knowledge of Cicero's letters. These were published without names to protect the recipients, all of whom had close relationships to Petrarch. 

His Letter to Posterity gives an autobiography and a synopsis of his philosophy in life. It was originally written in Latin and was completed in 1371 or 1372 -the first such autobiography in a thousand years, since Saint Augustine.

While Petrarch's poetry was set to music frequently after his death, especially by Italian madrigal composers of the Renaissance in the 16th century, only one musical setting composed during Petrarch's lifetime survives. This is Non al suo amante by Jacopo da Bologna, written around 1350.

More information: BBC

On April 6, 1327, after Petrarch gave up his vocation as a priest, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rime sparse. Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of 366 poems Il Canzoniere.

Laura may have been Laura de Noves, the wife of Count Hugues de Sade, an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade. There is little definite information in Petrarch's work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing.

Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact. According to his Secretum, she refused him because she was already married. He channeled his feelings into love poems that were exclamatory rather than persuasive, and wrote prose that showed his contempt for men who pursue women. Upon her death in 1348, the poet found that his grief was as difficult to live with as was his former despair.

In his Letter to Posterity, Petrarch wrote: In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair -my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.

Francesco & Laura

While it is possible she was an idealized or pseudonymous character -particularly since the name Laura has a linguistic connection to the poetic laurels Petrarch coveted- Petrarch himself always denied it.

His frequent use of l'aura is also remarkable: for example, the line Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi may both mean her hair was all over Laura's body, and the wind l'aura blew through her hair.

There is psychological realism in the description of Laura, although Petrarch draws heavily on conventionalised descriptions of love and lovers from troubadour songs and other literature of courtly love. Her presence causes him unspeakable joy, but his unrequited love creates unendurable desires, inner conflicts between the ardent lover and the mystic Christian, making it impossible to reconcile the two.

Petrarch's quest for love leads to hopelessness and irreconcilable anguish, as he expresses in the series of paradoxes in Rima 134 Pace non trovo, et non ò da far guerra;/e temo, et spero; et ardo, et son un ghiaccio: I find no peace, and yet I make no war:/and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice.

More information: Poetry in Transation-The Canzoniere

Laura is unreachable -the few physical descriptions of her are vague, almost impalpable as the love he pines for, and such is perhaps the power of his verse, which lives off the melodies it evokes against the fading, diaphanous image that is no more consistent than a ghost.

In addition, some today consider Laura to be a representation of an ideal Renaissance woman, based on her nature and definitive characteristics.

Petrarch is traditionally called the father of Humanism and considered by many to be the father of the Renaissance. In his work Secretum meum he points out that secular achievements did not necessarily preclude an authentic relationship with God.

Petrarch argued instead that God had given humans their vast intellectual and creative potential to be used to their fullest. He inspired humanist philosophy which led to the intellectual flowering of the Renaissance.

He believed in the immense moral and practical value of the study of ancient history and literature -that is, the study of human thought and action. Petrarch was a devout Catholic and did not see a conflict between realizing humanity's potential and having religious faith.

More information: The Guardian

How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation 

from the rocks of ignorance.

Petrarch

AREZZO, GIORGIO VASARI & REPUBLIC OF FLORENCE

Tina Picotes visits Arezzo, Tuscany

Today, Tina Picotes and her friends have visited Arezzo, a beautiful Tuscan city well-known by being the birthplace of Giorgio Vasari, one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.

Tina loves Art and she is very interested in knowing more things about this author who invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori.

Arezzo is a city and comune in Tuscany and the capital of the province of the same name located in Tuscany.

Described by Livy as one of the Capitae Etruriae, Etruscan capitals, Arezzo or Aritim in Etruscan, is believed to have been one of the twelve most important Etruscan cities—the so-called Dodecapolis, part of the Etruscan League. Etruscan remains establish that the acropolis of San Cornelio, a small hill next to that of San Donatus, was occupied and fortified in the Etruscan period.

Conquered by the Romans in 311 BC, Arretium became a military station on the via Cassia, the road by which Rome expanded into the basin of the Po. The old Etruscan aristocracy was not extinguished: Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, whose name has become eponymous with patron of the arts, came of the noble Aretine Etruscan stock.

Joseph de Ca'th Lon visits Arezzo, Tuscany

The city continued to flourish as Arretium Vetus, the third-largest city during the Augustan period, well known for its widely-exported pottery manufactures, the characteristic moulded and glazed Arretine ware, bucchero-ware of dark clay and red-painted vases, the so-called coral vases.

In the 3rd to 4th century Arezzo became an episcopal seat: it is one of the few cities whose succession of bishops are known by name without interruption to the present day, in part because the bishops operated as the feudal lords of the city in the Middle Ages.

The Roman city was demolished, partly in the course of the Gothic War and of the late-6th-century invasion of the Lombards, partly dismantled, as elsewhere throughout Europe. The Aretines re-used the stones for fortifications. Only the amphitheater remained.

The commune of Arezzo threw off the control of its bishop in 1098 and functioned as an independent city-state until 1384. Generally Ghibelline in tendency, it opposed Guelph Florence. In 1252 the city founded its university, the Studium.

More information: Visit Tuscany

Arezzo yielded to Florentine domination in 1384; its individual history became subsumed in that of Florence and of the Medicean Grand Duchy of Tuscany. During this period Piero della Francesca (c. 1415-1492) worked in the church of San Francesco di Arezzo producing the splendid frescoes, recently restored, which are Arezzo's most famous works. Afterwards the city began an economical and cultural decay, which ensured the preservation of its medieval centre.

In the 18th century the neighbouring marshes of the Val di Chiana, south of Arezzo, were drained and the region became less malarial. At the end of the-century French troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Arezzo, but the city soon turned (1799-1800) into a resistance base against the invaders with the Viva Maria movement, winning the city the role of provincial capital. In 1860 Arezzo became part of the Kingdom of Italy.

Visiting Arezzo, Tuscany

City buildings suffered heavy damage during World War II; the Germans made a stand in front of Arezzo early in July 1944 and fierce fighting ensued before the British 6th Armoured Division, assisted by New Zealand troops of the 2nd New Zealand Division, liberated the town 16 July 1944. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission's Arezzo War Cemetery, where 1,266 men are buried, is located to the north-west of the city.

Arezzo is set on a steep hill rising from the floodplain of the River Arno. In the upper part of the town are the cathedral, the town hall and the Fortezza Medicea, from which the main streets branch off towards the lower part as far as the gates. The upper part of the town maintains its medieval appearance despite the addition of later structures.

Arezzo's city proper is near the high risk areas for earthquakes, but located in a transitional area where the risk for severe earthquakes is much lower than in nearby Umbria and Abruzzo, albeit it is slightly more vulnerable than Florence.

Arezzo has a starring role in Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella, 1997). It is the place in which the main characters live before they are shipped off to a Nazi concentration camp.

More information: Discover Tuscany

Giorgio Vasari (30 July 1511-27 June 1574) was an Tuscan painter, architect, writer, and historian, most famous today for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.

Vasari was born on 30 July 1511 in Arezzo, Tuscany. Recommended at an early age by his cousin Luca Signorelli, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skillful painter of stained glass.

Sent to Florence at the age of sixteen by Cardinal Silvio Passerini, he joined the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo, where his humanist education was encouraged. He was befriended by Michelangelo, whose painting style would influence his own. He died on 27 June 1574 in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, aged 62.

Giorgio Vasari

In 1529, he visited Rome where he studied the works of Raphael and other artists of the Roman High Renaissance. Vasari's own Mannerist paintings were more admired in his lifetime than afterwards.

In 1547 he completed the hall of the chancery in Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome with frescoes that received the name Sala dei Cento Giorni. He was consistently employed by members of the Medici family in Florence and Rome, and worked in Naples, Arezzo and other places.

Many of his pictures still exist, the most important being the wall and ceiling paintings in the Sala di Cosimo I in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he and his assistants were at work from 1555, and the frescoes begun by him inside the vast cupola of the Duomo were completed by Federico Zuccari and with the help of Giovanni Balducci.

He also helped to organize the decoration of the Studiolo, now reassembled in the Palazzo Vecchio. In Rome he painted frescos in the Sala Regia.

More information: Florence Inferno

Aside from his career as a painter, Vasari was also successful as an architect. His loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard. It is a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, and which, if considered as a short street, is unique as a Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment. The view of the Loggia from the Arno reveals that, with the Vasari Corridor, it is one of very few structures that line the river which are open to the river itself and appear to embrace the riverside environment.

In Florence, Vasari also built the long passage, now called Vasari Corridor, which connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river. The enclosed corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio and winds around the exterior of several buildings. It was once the home of the Mercado de Vecchio.

Le Vite by Giorgio Vasari

He also renovated the medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. At both he removed the original rood screen and loft, and remodelled the retro-choirs in the Mannerist taste of his time. In Santa Croce, he was responsible for the painting of The Adoration of the Magi which was commissioned by Pope Pius V in 1566 and completed in February 1567.

In 1562 Vasari built the octagonal dome on the Basilica of Our Lady of Humility in Pistoia, an important example of high Renaissance architecture.

Often called the first art historian, Vasari invented the genre of the encyclopedia of artistic biographies with his Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori in English Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, which was first published in 1550.

He was the first to use the term Renaissance, Rinascita, in print, though an awareness of the ongoing rebirth in the arts had been in the air since the time of Alberti, and he was responsible for our use of the term Gothic Art, though he only used the word Goth which he associated with the barbaric German style. The Lives also included a novel treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. The book was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568, with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists, some conjectural.

Vasari enjoyed high repute during his lifetime and amassed a considerable fortune. In 1547, he built himself a fine house in Arezzo, now a museum honouring him, and decorated its walls and vaults with paintings. He was elected to the municipal council of his native town, and finally rose to the supreme office of gonfaloniere. He was made Knight of the Golden Spur by the Pope. He married Niccolosa Bacci, a member of one the richest and most prominent families of Arezzo.

In 1563, he helped found the Florentine Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, with the Grand Duke and Michelangelo as capi of the institution and 36 artists chosen as members.

Download Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

 Art owes its origin to Nature herself... 

this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, 

while the original teacher was that divine 

intelligence which has not only made us superior 

to the other animals, but like God Himself, 

if I may venture to say it.

Giorgio Vasari

LUCCA, GIACOMO PUCCINI'S BIRTHPLACE IN TUSCANY

Tina Picotes visits Lucca, Tuscany

Today, Tina Picotes and her friends have visited Lucca, a beautiful Tuscan town with an amazing history influenced by Estruscans, Romans, Germans, Jews,  Malaspina family and Napoleon. Lucca is also the birthplace of one of the greatest genius of music, Giacommo Puccini.

During the travel from Pistoia to Lucca, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 17).

More information: Work and Study

Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, on the Serchio, in a fertile plain near the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital of the Province of Lucca. It is famous for its intact Renaissance-era city walls.

Lucca was founded by the Etruscans, there are traces of an earlier Ligurian settlement in the 3rd century BC called Luk meaning marsh in which the name Lucca originated, and became a Roman colony in 180 BC. The rectangular grid of its historical centre preserves the Roman street plan, and the Piazza San Michele occupies the site of the ancient forum. Traces of the amphitheatre may still be seen in the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro.

At the Lucca Conference, in 56 BC, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus reaffirmed their political alliance known as the First Triumvirate.

Frediano, an Irish monk, was bishop of Lucca in the early sixth century. At one point, Lucca was plundered by Odoacer, the first Germanic King of Italy. Lucca was an important city and fortress even in the sixth century, when Narses besieged it for several months in 553.

Under the Lombards, it was the seat of a duke who minted his own coins. The Holy Face of Lucca or Volto Santo, a major relic supposedly carved by Nicodemus, arrived in 742.

Piazza dell'Anfiteatro, Lucca

During the eighth-tenth centuries Lucca was a center of Jewish life, the community being led by the Kalonymos family, which at some point during this time migrated to Germany to become a major component of proto-Ashkenazic Jewry.

Lucca became prosperous through the silk trade that began in the eleventh century, and came to rival the silks of Byzantium. During the tenth–eleventh centuries Lucca was the capital of the feudal margraviate of Tuscany, more or less independent but owing nominal allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor.

After the death of Matilda of Tuscany, the city began to constitute itself an independent commune with a charter in 1160. For almost 500 years, Lucca remained an independent republic. There were many minor provinces in the region between southern Liguria and northern Tuscany dominated by the Malaspina; Tuscany in this time was a part of feudal Europe.

Dante’s Divine Comedy includes many references to the great feudal families who had huge jurisdictions with administrative and judicial rights. Dante spent some of his exile in Lucca.

In 1273 and again in 1277, Lucca was ruled by a Guelph capitano del popolo, captain of the people, named Luchetto Gattilusio. In 1314, internal discord allowed Uguccione della Faggiuola of Pisa to make himself lord of Lucca. The Lucchesi expelled him two years later, and handed over the city to another condottiero, Castruccio Castracani, under whose rule it became a leading state in central Italy.

More information: Città di Lucca (Italian version)

Lucca rivalled Florence until Castracani's death in 1328. On 22 and 23 September 1325, in the battle of Altopascio, Castracani defeated Florence's Guelphs. For this he was nominated by Louis IV the Bavarian to become duke of Lucca. Castracani's tomb is in the church of San Francesco. His biography is Machiavelli's third famous book on political rule.

In 1408, Lucca hosted the convocation intended to end the schism in the papacy. Occupied by the troops of Louis of Bavaria, the city was sold to a rich Genoese, Gherardino Spinola, then seized by John, king of Bohemia. Pawned to the Rossi of Parma, by them it was ceded to Mastino II della Scala of Verona, sold to the Florentines, surrendered to the Pisans, and then nominally liberated by the emperor Charles IV and governed by his vicar.

Visiting Chiesa San Michele, Lucca

Lucca managed, at first as a democracy, and after 1628 as an oligarchy, to maintain its independence alongside of Venice and Genoa, and painted the word Libertas on its banner until the French Revolution in 1789.

Lucca had been the second largest Italian city state, after Venice, with a republican constitution comune to remain independent over the centuries. In 1805, Lucca was conquered by Napoleon, who installed his sister Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi as Princess of Lucca.

From 1815 to 1847 it was a Bourbon-Parma duchy. The only reigning dukes of Lucca were Maria Luisa of Spain, who was succeeded by her son Charles II, Duke of Parma in 1824. Meanwhile, the Duchy of Parma had been assigned for life to Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma, the second wife of Napoleon.

More information: Discover Tuscany

In accordance with the Treaty of Vienna (1815), upon the death of Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma in 1847, Parma reverted to Charles II, Duke of Parma, while Lucca lost independence and was annexed to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. As part of Tuscany, it became part of the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1860 and finally part of the Italian State in 1861.

The walls encircling the old town remain intact, even as the city expanded and modernized, unusual for cities in the region. Initially built as a defensive rampart, once the walls lost their military importance they became a pedestrian promenade, the Passeggiata delle Mura Urbane, a street atop the walls linking the bastions.

The town includes a number of public squares, most notably the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro, site of ancient Roman amphitheater.

More information: Tuscany Beautiful Everywhere

Whatever a guidebook says, 

wether or not you leave somewhere 

with a sense of the place is entirely 

a matter of smell and instinct.

Frances Mayes

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (22 December 1858-29 November 1924) was a Tuscan opera composer who has been called the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi.

Puccini's early work was rooted in traditional late-19th-century romantic Italian opera. Later, he successfully developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.

Puccini's most renowned works are La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1924), all of which are among the important operas played as standards.

Puccini was born Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini in Lucca, Tuscany in 1858. He was one of nine children of Michele Puccini and Albina Magi.

Giacomo Puccini

The Puccini family was established in Lucca as a local musical dynasty by Puccini's great-great-grandfather -also named Giacomo (1712–1781).

Puccini wrote an orchestral piece called the Capriccio sinfonico as a thesis composition for the Milan Conservatory. Puccini's teachers Ponchielli and Bazzini were impressed by the work, and it was performed at a student concert at the conservatory on 14 July 1883, conducted by Franco Faccio.

Puccini's work was favorably reviewed in the Milanese publication Perseveranza, and thus Puccini began to build a reputation as a young composer of promise in Milanese music circles.

After the premiere of the Capriccio sinfonico, Ponchielli and Puccini discussed the possibility that Puccini's next work might be an opera. Ponchielli invited Puccini to stay at his villa, where Puccini was introduced to another young man named Ferdinando Fontana.

More information: Opera Tours Italy

Puccini and Fontana agreed to collaborate on an opera, for which Fontana would provide the libretto. The work, Le Villi, was entered into a competition sponsored by the Sozogno music publishing company in 1883, the same competition in which Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana was the winner in 1889. Giulio Ricordi, head of G. Ricordi & Co. music publishers, was sufficiently impressed with Le Villi and its young composer that he commissioned a second opera, which would result in Edgar. 

On commencing his next opera, Manon Lescaut, Puccini announced that he would write his own libretto so that no fool of a librettist could spoil it. Ricordi persuaded him to accept Ruggero Leoncavallo as his librettist, but Puccini soon asked Ricordi to remove him from the project.

Giacomo Puccini

Four other librettists were then involved with the opera, as Puccini constantly changed his mind about the structure of the piece. It was almost by accident that the final two, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, came together to complete the opera.

Puccini's next work after Manon Lescaut was La bohème, a four-act opera based on the 1851 book by Henri Murger, La Vie de Bohème. La bohème premiered in Turin in 1896, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Within a few years, it had been performed throughout many of the leading opera houses of Europe, including Britain, as well as in the United States. It was a popular success, and remains one of the most frequently performed operas ever written.  

Puccini's next work after La bohème was Tosca (1900), arguably Puccini's first foray into verismo, the realistic depiction of many facets of real life including violence.

More information: English National Opera

Puccini had been considering an opera on this theme since he saw the play Tosca by Victorien Sardou in 1889, when he wrote to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, begging him to get Sardou's permission for the work to be made into an opera: I see in this Tosca the opera I need, with no overblown proportions, no elaborate spectacle, nor will it call for the usual excessive amount of music.

On 25 February 1903, Puccini was seriously injured in a car crash during a nighttime journey on the road from Lucca to Torre del Lago. The accident and its consequences slowed Puccini's completion of his next work, Madama Butterfly.

Giacomo Puccini

The original version of Madama Butterfly, premiered at La Scala on 17 February 1904 with Rosina Storchio in the title role.

It was initially greeted with great hostility, probably largely owing to inadequate rehearsals. When Storchio's kimono accidentally lifted during the performance, some in the audience started shouting: The butterfly is pregnant and There is the little Toscanini. The latter comment referred to her well publicised affair with Arturo Toscanini. This version was in two acts; after its disastrous premiere, Puccini withdrew the opera, revising it for what was virtually a second premiere at Brescia in May 1904 and performances in Buenos Aires, London, the USA and Paris.

In 1907, Puccini made his final revisions to the opera in a fifth version, which has become known as the standard version.

Today, the standard version of the opera is the version most often performed around the world. However, the original 1904 version is occasionally performed as well, and has been recorded.

After 1904, Puccini's compositions were less frequent. In 1906 Giacosa died and, in 1909, there was scandal after Puccini's wife, Elvira, falsely accused their maid Doria Manfredi of having an affair with Puccini.

Finally, in 1912, the death of Giulio Ricordi, Puccini's editor and publisher, ended a productive period of his career

More information: CMuse

Inspiration is an awakening, 

a quickening of all man's faculties, 

and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

Giacomo Puccini