#mount ventoux

Francesco Petrarch, accompanied by his brother Gherardo, made an ascent of 6,263-foot (1,912-meters) Mont Ventoux on April 26 in 1336, a towering rounded mountain that overlooks the Provence region of southern France.

Petrarch, while certainly not the first human to climb a mountain for fun and to reach its summit, instead became the spiritual “father” of alpinism while slogging up to Ventoux’s summit, meditating on his experience, and then writing a celebrated 6,000-word essay-The Ascent of Mount Ventoux-after his descent (scholars now say it was written about 1350). As Petrarch wrote in the essay, actually a letter to his former confessor, “My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.”

Read more
An essay on this