Petrarch followed.

His ideal, of antique culture as the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race, his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world.

After Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of freedom.

His conception of human existence as joy to be accepted with thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering, familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semi-pagan gladness which marked the real Renaissance.
In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of intellectual liberty.

What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived; but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.
With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to create confidently after its own fashion.