He climbed a mountain for the view—then opened Augustine
Francesco Petrarca (20 July 1304–19 July 1374) is credited with sparking Renaissance humanism by rediscovering Cicero’s letters. Yet his most famous day may be 26 April 1336, when he climbed Mont Ventoux for pleasure, surveyed the Alps, and turned inward after a chance page of Augustine’s Confessions.
Born in Arezzo to notary Ser Petracco and Eletta Canigiani—Dante was his father’s friend—he spent childhood near Florence, then Avignon after Pope Clement V moved there in 1309. Law years at Montpellier (1316–1320) and Bologna (1320–1326) felt wasted; his father once burned his Latin books. After his parents died he returned to Avignon in 1326 for clerical posts that bought writing time. Africa, a Latin epic on Scipio Africanus, made him a celebrity; on 8 April 1341 Roman senators crowned him poet laureate on the Capitoline—the second such laureation since antiquity.
Travel for diplomacy and manuscript hunting followed. In 1345 in Verona’s cathedral library he found Cicero’s Epistulae ad Atticum, previously unknown. He backed Homeric translation yet admitted Greek left Homer “dumb to him.” The Ventoux letter to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro—partly literary reconstruction—stages modern landscape awe against Christian self-scrutiny when Augustine’s warning about wondering at mountains but not at the soul falls open. Scholars now reject his “Dark Ages” label as misleading, but the phrase stuck.
Church career barred marriage; he legitimised son Giovanni (1337) and daughter Francesca (1343). Giovanni died of plague in 1361; Francesca’s family later shared his Venetian and Arquà years. He died at Arquà on 18/19 July 1374. Italian fame rests on the 366-poem Canzoniere and I Trionfi, yet most of his labour was Latin—Secretum, De viris illustribus, letter collections—that taught Europe how to talk to antiquity.
Source: Petrarch
