#petrarch

Upscaled and cleaned a portrait of Petrarch.

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.”

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An essay on this

Leaf from Petrarch, Africa, Book IX Lombardy, ca. 1400 The Free Library of Philadelphia, Lewis E M 48:4