Sonnet

The sonnet, a fixed poetic form, traditionally has fourteen lines and a set rhyme scheme. Its name comes from the Italian *sonetto* ("little song"), which traces back to the Latin *sonus* ("sound"). The form originated in 13th-century Sicily, where it was first used to write about romantic love, though later poets in many European languages wrote sonnets on any subject. Over time, formal variations appeared, including sonnets that abandoned the fourteen-line limit or even rhyme altogether.

In Sicily, Giacomo da Lentini is credited with inventing the sonnet at the Court of Frederick II in Palermo. The Sicilian School of poets around him spread the form to mainland Italy. The earliest sonnets survive only in Tuscan dialect translations, not the original Sicilian. These early sonnets had a pair of quatrains followed by a pair of tercets, with a symmetrical rhyme scheme and a shift in meaning after the midway break. Peter Dronke noted that something in the sonnet's flexible form helped it survive far beyond its origin. William Baer argued that the first eight lines of the earliest Sicilian sonnets match the eight-line Sicilian folksong stanza called the *strambotto*, to which da Lentini added two tercets to create the fourteen-line form. In contrast, Hassanally Ladha argued that the Sicilian sonnet's structure and content drew on Arabic poetry, particularly the *qasida*, and that the sonnet did not emerge with its supposedly defining fourteen-line structure. He pointed out that Giacomo's poems survive in six-line recensions, not fourteen, and saw the sonnet as a continuation of a broader Mediterranean love poetry tradition, related to the *strambotto*, *canso*, *muwashshah*, *zajal*, and *qasida*.

Guittone d'Arezzo rediscovered the sonnet and brought it to Tuscany, adapting it to the Tuscan dialect and founding the Siculo-Tuscan (Guittonian) school. He wrote nearly 250 sonnets. Later Italian poets included Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti, but the most famous and influential was Petrarch. The typical Italian sonnet developed two parts: an octave forming the "proposition" (describing a problem or question) and a sestet (two tercets) proposing a "resolution." The ninth line often marks the "turn" or *volta*, signaling the shift from proposition to resolution. The standard rhyme scheme became for the octave, with sestet possibilities like or . Petrarch typically used for the octave and or for the sestet. Early sonnet sequences unified around a single theme appeared around the turn of the 14th century, such as Folgore da San Gimignano's series on months and days. Dante's *La Vita Nuova* included sonnets and other lyrics about his love for Beatrice, most following the Petrarchan structure. Petrarch later wrote 366 sonnets in the *Canzionere* about his lifelong love for Laura. Sonnet writing became so widespread in Italy that practitioners included painters Giotto and Michelangelo, astronomer Galileo, and academician Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni listed 661 poets just in the 16th century. One literary historian noted that no event was too trivial—a tradesman opening a larger shop or a clerk getting a salary increase—for friends to celebrate with a sonnet.

The only confirmed surviving sonnet in Occitan is by Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia, dated to 1284, with the rhyme scheme and a political theme. Other Occitan sonnets of dubious authenticity are ascribed to "William of Almarichi" and Dante de Maiano. In Catalan, one of the earliest sonnets was written by Pere Torroella (1436–1486), and the 16th century saw the most prolific and subtle Catalan sonnet writer.