When, in 1345, Petrarch discovered at Verona a manuscript of Cicero's ‘lost’ works, the Epistulae ad Atticum, ad Quintum fratrem and ad Brutum (6–18), his excitement was immeasurable. It was as though the access to this correspondence invited him to enjoy a new level of intimacy with the classical writer, and he expressed his delight in a letter addressed to Cicero himself. The event is an icon of Renaissance humanists' burning desire not only to retrieve the classical past, but also to initiate a dialogue with those whom they admired. The rediscovery of Greek and Latin manuscripts was a preliminary stage in the translatio studiorum, leading to the philologists' quests for the most accurately emended text, and thence to a process of commentary, as each scholar sought to interpret a work anew. The humanists of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy vastly increased the corpus of classical texts available in the West: Petrarch and Poggio between them rediscovered approximately half of the works of Cicero which are now extant; Boccaccio found substantial parts of Tacitus at Monte Cassino; Salutati built up a private library in Florence of some 800 classical works, which he made available to others, and, by inviting the scholar Manuel Chrysoloras from Constantinople to teach Greek, gave added pace to humanists' energetic search for manuscripts from the East. As new texts and new versions of familiar ones became available, translation soon occupied a significant place in the process of transmission, with scholars first rendering Greek texts into Latin, and, subsequently, Latin into the vernacular.