Petrarch in avignon
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Ascent of Mont Ventoux
Petrarch's ascent during 1336.
The Italian poet Petrarch wrote about his ascent of Mont Ventoux (in Provence; elevation 1912 meters) on 26 April 1336 in a well-known letter published as one of his Epistolae familiares (IV, 1). In this letter, written around 1350, Petrarch claimed to be the first person since antiquity to have climbed a mountain for the view. Although the historical accuracy of his account has been questioned by modern scholars, it is often cited in discussions of the new spirit of the Renaissance.
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Petrarch's letter is addressed to his former confessor, Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. It says he ascended the mountain with his brother Gherardo and two servants exactly ten years after they had left Bologna. They began at the village of Malaucène at the foot of the mountain. On the way up, they met an old shepherd who said he had climbed the mountain some fifty years before, finding only rocks and brambles and that no one else had done it before or since. The brothers continued, Gherardo continuing up the ridge they we
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Petrarch’s Ascent of Mont Ventoux and Philosophy
Related papers
Gareth D. Williams
Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, edited by Dawn Hollis, and Jason König, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021, 2021
Th e Etna encountered by most classicists as they range over the Graeco-Roman literary canon is rarely the bare and literal object of real-life experience and observation. Far more common is the idea of Etna, that stimulus to the imagination that licenses writers from Hesiod onwards to generate their own highly creative, oft en powerfully symbolic versions of the mountain. 1 My purpose in what follows is to contemplate Etna through this bifocal lens, but to approach this hybrid experience of the mountain-the diff erent but sometimes combined strands of physical and literary visitation of the volcano-via one particular category of mountain experience: the feigned ascent, or what we might suspect to be the fabricated ascent, of a given peak. If the Graeco-Roman tradition of
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Petrarch
For the thoroughbred racehorse, see Petrarch (horse). For his namesake crater on Mercury, see Petrarch (crater).
14th-century Italian scholar and poet
Francis Petrarch (; 20 July 1304 – 19 July 1374; Latin: Franciscus Petrarcha; modern Italian: Francesco Petrarca[franˈtʃeskopeˈtrarka]), born Francesco di Petracco, was a scholar from Arezzo and poet of the early Italian Renaissance and one of the earliest humanists.[1]
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited with initiating the 14th-century Italian Renaissance and the founding of Renaissance humanism.[2] In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio, and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri.[3] Petrarch was later endorsed as a model for Italian style by the Accademia della Crusca.
Petrarch's sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. He is also known for being the first to
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