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[edit] Biography

Petrarch says he was born on Garden Street of the city of Arezzo, just at the dawn on a Monday. He was the son of Ser Petracco. He spent his early childhood in the village of Incisa, near Florence. Petrarch spent much of his early life at Avignon and nearby Carpentras, where his family moved to follow Pope Clement V who moved there in 1309 to begin the Avignon Papacy. He studied law at Montpellier (1316–20) and Bologna (1320–23) with a life long friend and schoolmate called Guido Sette. Because his father was in the profession of law he insisted that he and his brother study law also. Petrarch however was primarily interested in writing and Latin literature and considered this seven wasted years. Additionally he proclaimed that through legal manipulation his guardians robbed him of his small property inheritance in Florence which only reinforced his dislike for the legal system. Protesting he declared, "I couldn't face making a merchandise of my mind", as he view the legal system as the art of selling justice. ^[1]

Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and counted Giovanni Boccaccio among his notable friends that he wrote to often. After the death of their parents, Petrarch and his brother Gherardo went back to Avignon in 1326, where he worked in numerous different clerical offices. This work gave him much time to devote to his writing. With his first large scale work, Africa, an epic in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity. On April 8, 1341, he became the first poet laureate since antiquity and was crowned on the holy grounds of Rome's Capitol. He was the first laureate of the tradition in modern times to be given this honor.^[2]

He traveled widely in Europe and served as an ambassador and has been called "the first tourist" ^[3] because he traveled just for the pleasure alone,^[4] which was the basic reason why he climbed Mont Ventoux.^[5] During his travels, he collected crumbling Latin manuscripts and was a prime mover in the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece. He encouraged and advised Leontius Pilatus's translation of Homer, from a manuscript purchased by Boccaccio; although he was severely, and perhaps unfairly, critical of the result. Petrarch had acquired a copy, which he did not entrust to Leontius, ^[6] but he knew no Greek; Homer, Petrarch said, "was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer".^[7] In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed, the collection ad Atticum. He remarked:

Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the centuries preceding the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited with creating the concept of a historical "Dark Ages".^[8]

Petrarch claimed that on April 26, 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (1,909 m; 6,263 ft). He wrote an account of the trip, composed considerably later as a letter to his friend Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. The accuracy of Petrarch's account is open to question; particularly the assertion that he was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since Philip V of Macedon, and that an aged peasant had warned him off the unclimbable mountain. Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and other ascents are recorded from the Middle Ages, including Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne. Jakob Burckhardt's rhapsody on the subject has been often repeated since. ^[9]

J.H. Plumb writes in his book The Italian Renaissance of Morris Bishop's version of Petrarch's Ascent of Mont Ventoux showing Petrarch's climb in 1336 was epoch making. ^[10] This was because Petrarch did this climb on his own volition and not because anything was forced upon him. Petrarch's letter of the ascent to his confessor,^[11] the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, rings of aesthetic gratification to grandeur and majesty, ^[12] a modern attitude that is quoted to this day in many books and journals pertaining to mountaineering.^[13]

"For pleasure alone he climbed Mount Ventoux, which rises to more than six thousand feet, beyond Vaucluse. It was no great feat, of course, but he was the first recorded Alpinist of modern times, the first to climb a mountain merely for the delight of looking from its top. (Or almost the first; for in a high pasture he met an old shepard, who said that fifty years before he had attained the summit, and had got nothing from it save toil and repentance and torn clothing.) Petrarch was dazed and stirred by the view of the Alps, the mountains around Lyons, the Rhone, the Bay of Marseilles.^[14]

The later part of his life he spent in journeying through northern Italy as an international scholar and poet-diplomat. Petrarch's career in the Church did not allow him to marry, but he did father two children by a woman or women unknown to posterity. A son, Giovanni, was born in 1337, and a daughter, Francesca, was born in 1343. Both he later legitimized.^[15]

Giovanni died of the plague in 1361. Francesca married Francescuolo da Brossano (who was later named executor of Petrarch's Last Will and Testament) that same year. In 1362, shortly after the birth of a daughter, Eletta (same name as Petrarch's mother), they joined Petrarch in Venice, to flee the plague then ravaging parts of Europe. A second grandchild, Francesco, was born in 1366, but died before his second birthday. Francesca and her family lived with Petrarch in Venice for five years from 1362 - 1367 at Palazzo Molina; although Petrarch continued to travel in those years.

About 1368 Petrarch and his daughter Francesca (with her family) moved and settled in Padua, where he passed his remaining years in religious contemplation. He died in Arquà in the Euganean Hills on July 19, 1374 - just one day short of his seventieth birthday being the age of 69, the same number of years of the Avignon papacy residency.

Petrarch's will (dated April 4, 1370) leaves fifty florins to Boccaccio "to buy a warm winter dressing gown"; various legacies (a horse, a silver cup, a lute, a Madonna) to his brother and his friends; his house in Vaucluse to its caretaker; for his soul, and for the poor; and the bulk of his estate to his son-in-law, Francescuolo da Brossano, who is to give half of it to "the person to whom, as he knows, I wish it to go"; presumably his daughter, Francesca, Brossano's wife. The will mentions neither the property in Arquà, nor his library; Petrarch's library of notable manuscripts was already promised to Venice, in exchange for the Palazzo Molina. This arrangement was probably cancelled when he moved to Padua, the enemy of Venice, in 1368. The library was seized by the lords of Padua, and his books and manuscripts are now widely divided over Europe.^[16] Nevertheless, the Biblioteca Marciana traditionally claimed this bequest as its founding; although it was in fact founded by Cardinal Bessarion in 1468. ^[17]