Youth and early career Petrarch was born in the
Tuscan city
Arezzo on 20 July 1304. He was the son of
Ser Petracco (a diminutive nickname for
Pietro) and his wife Eletta Canigiani. Petrarch's birth name was
Francesco di Petracco ("Francesco [son] of Petracco"), which he
Latinized to
Franciscus Petrarcha. His younger brother Gherardo (Gerard Petrarch) was born in
Incisa in Val d'Arno in 1307.
Dante Alighieri was a friend of his father. Petrarch spent his early childhood in the village of
Incisa, near
Florence. He 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. Petrarch studied law at the
University of Montpellier (1316–1320) and
Bologna (1320–1326) with a lifelong friend and schoolmate,
Guido Sette, future archbishop of Genoa. Because his father was in the legal profession (a
notary), he insisted that Petrarch and his brother also study law. Petrarch, however, was primarily interested in writing and studying
Latin literature and considered these seven years wasted. Petrarch became so distracted by his non-legal interests that his father once threw his books into a fire, which he later lamented. 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. He protested, "I couldn't face making a merchandise of my mind", since he viewed the legal system as the art of selling justice.
poet laureate since
classical antiquity and was crowned by Roman
Senatori Giordano Orsini and Orso dell'Anguillara on the sacred soil of Rome's
Capitoline Hill. He traveled widely in Europe, served as an ambassador, and has been called "the first
tourist" because he traveled for pleasure such as his
ascent of Mont Ventoux. 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 critical of the result. Petrarch had acquired a copy, which he did not entrust to Leontius, but he knew no
Greek; Petrarch said of himself, "Homer was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer". In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of
Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed, the collection
Epistulae ad Atticum, in the
Chapter Library (
Biblioteca Capitolare) of
Verona Cathedral. Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of
the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited with creating the concept of a historical "
Dark Ages",
Mount Ventoux Petrarch recounts that on 26 April 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of
Mont Ventoux (, a feat which he undertook for recreation rather than necessity. The exploit is described in a famous letter addressed to his friend and confessor, the monk
Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, composed some time after the fact. In it, Petrarch claimed to have been inspired by
Philip V of Macedon's ascent of
Mount Haemo and that an aged peasant had told him that nobody had ascended Ventoux before or after himself, 50 years earlier, and warned him against attempting to do so. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian
Jacob Burckhardt noted that
Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and ascents accomplished during the
Middle Ages have been recorded, including that of
Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne. Scholars note that Petrarch's letter to Dionigi displays a strikingly "modern" attitude of aesthetic gratification in the grandeur of the scenery and is still often cited in books and journals devoted to the sport of
mountaineering. In Petrarch, this attitude is coupled with an aspiration for a virtuous Christian life, and on reaching the summit, he took from his pocket a volume by his beloved mentor, Saint Augustine, that he always carried with him. For pleasure alone he climbed Mont 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 shepherd, 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. He took Augustine's
Confessions from his pocket and reflected that his climb was merely an allegory of aspiration toward a better life. As
the book fell open, Petrarch's eyes were immediately drawn to the following words: Petrarch's response was to turn from the outer world of nature to the inner world of "soul":
James Hillman argues that this rediscovery of the inner world is the real significance of the Ventoux event. The Renaissance begins not with the ascent of Mont Ventoux but with the subsequent descent—the "return [...] to the valley of soul", as Hillman puts it.
Later years Petrarch spent the later part of his life journeying through northern Italy and southern France as an international scholar and poet-diplomat. His career in
the Church did not allow him to marry, but he is believed to have fathered 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. He later legitimized both. For a number of years in the 1340s and 1350s he lived in a small house at
Fontaine-de-Vaucluse east of
Avignon in France. house near
Padua where he retired to spend his last years Giovanni died of the
plague in 1361. In the same year Petrarch was named
canon in
Monselice near
Padua. Francesca married
Francescuolo da Brossano, who was later named executor of Petrarch's
will, that same year. In 1362, shortly after the birth of a daughter, Eletta (the 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 to 1367 at
Palazzo Molina; although Petrarch continued to travel in those years. Between 1361 and 1369 the younger Boccaccio paid the older Petrarch two visits. The first was in Venice, the second was in Padua. About 1368 Petrarch and Francesca (with her family) moved to the small town of
Arquà in the
Euganean Hills near Padua, where he passed his remaining years in religious contemplation. He died in his house in Arquà on 18/19 July 1374. The house now hosts a permanent exhibition of Petrarch's works and curiosities, including the famous tomb of an embalmed cat long believed to be Petrarch's (although there is no evidence Petrarch actually had a cat). On the marble slab, there is a Latin inscription written by
Antonio Quarenghi: Petrarch's will (dated 4 April 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; money for Masses offered for his
soul, and money 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
da Carrara lords of Padua, and his books and manuscripts are now widely scattered over Europe. Nevertheless, the
Biblioteca Marciana traditionally claimed this bequest as its founding, although it was in fact founded by
Cardinal Bessarion in 1468. ==Works==