Canzone means 'a song' in Italian. This poetic form dates back to medieval Italy, where it was used by writers including Petrarch and Dante before evolving into the sonnet. It has anywhere between seven and 20 lines with ten or eleven syllables each.
The canzone, sometimes also known as a canzona, is a 16th-17th century Italian verse form that is made up of somewhere between one and seven stanzas, each of which is of a similar length. Usually, there are eight to twenty lines per stanza and 10-11 syllables per line. In some variations of the verse form, the poet makes use of keywords rather than a traditional rhyme scheme. Often times the verse form is compared to a madrigal or a sestina. These keywords, which vary from poem to poem, are crucial to the overall structure and are intimately connected to the larger themes of the work, whatever they may be.

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