How a Renaissance Poet's 1336 Climb Inspired Generations of Hikers

Looming over the landscape of Provence in southern France, Mont Ventoux rises to a height of 6,270 feet with a windswept, bare-rock limestone summit that shines like snow even in the summer. Today you can drive a car or even race a bicycle to the top if the weather is good, but the peak nicknamed the “Giant of Provence” holds a special place in the history of mountaineering for its association with the Italian poet Petrarch. The poet’s account of ascending it in 1336 has become a touchstone for modern quest for self-discovery and an inspiration to generations of people who head to the mountains for recreation.

In his own time, at the beginning of what would later be labeled the Renaissance, Petrarch was far better known for his sonnets (a form of that poetic style is still named after him) and for his literary elevation of his native Tuscan dialect. In fact, his writings provided one of the templates for the development of modern Italian.

Born Francesco di Petracco in Arezzo, Tuscany in 1304 and raised partly in Avignon, in what is now southern France, Petrarch trained in the law, flirted with a call to the priesthood, and found fame as a poet. Inspired in part by a collection of the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero’s letters he had rediscovered in a church archive, Petrarch spent years collecting and revising his own letters—some to friends, some to public figures and a few to long-dead people including Cicero himself.

In one of these epistles, dated April 26, 1336, and addressed to his spiritual mentor Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, Petrarch describes his journey up and down Mont Ventoux. “Today I made the ascent of the highest mountain in the region,” he begins. “My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.” Petrarch says the idea of a climb had been germinating for years, since reading a classical account about an ancient Greek king who had done something similar.

What Petrarch found at the summit was not only an expansive view—taking in the landscape from the Alps to the Mediterranean Sea and up the valley of the Rhône—but also an introspective epiphany. He opened his pocket copy of Augustine’s Confessions to a random page and read an admonition from the fourth-century Christian theologian: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers … but themselves they consider not.”

“Then,” Petrarch continued his letter, “I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself.” Petrarch says he descended the mountain in silence, reaching an inn by moonlight and sitting down to write a letter for the ages while his servants made him dinner.

Petrarch’s letter was published along the others in his collections, but didn’t attract much attention until the mid-1800s, says Peter Hansen, a professor of humanities and arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who writes about the meanings taken from Petrarch’s ascent in The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment. It was then that cultural historians like Georg Vogt and Jacob Burckhardt began analyzing the period of European political, intellectual and artistic history from the 14th through 16th centuries as a coherent era called the Renaissance.

Petrarch was held up as one of the thinkers who helped get the Renaissance started. He was one of the first to suggest that after the fall of the Roman empire, Europe had been languishing in the “Dark Ages.” Petrarch embodied the key Renaissance motif of taking inspiration from ancient Greece and Rome to create something new. To these post-Enlightenment historians, Petrarch was not just an early example of a “Renaissance Man,” he was perhaps the first truly modern man—a distinction Vogt suggested he earned at the summit of Mont Ventoux.

The mid-1800s were also a boom time in the development of mountaineering, as alpine clubs were established throughout Europe and beyond. Adventurers sought to reach summits for reasons that interwove the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment and the stormy self-expression of the Romantic era. It was part of a significant evolution in how people in Europe and the West thought about mountains, moving from viewing them primarily as wild and dangerous natural obstacles to celebrating them as places for potential scientific, nationalistic or personal exploration.

“I do see a fairly large change in practice in the 18th century and the 19th century where people start climbing the mountains, and they want to do it to be first—to make first ascents.” Hansen says. “What makes Petrarch attractive to them is that they can point to him as this antecedent—this other person who was first. But they don’t start thinking about him until after all these other people are going to climb mountains.”

Petrarch never claimed to be the first person to stand atop Mont Ventoux—or even the first person since classical times to climb a mountain simply “because it’s there,” in the famous words of 20th-century mountaineer George Mallory. The view of Petrarch as the “first Alpinist” emphasizes the parts of the story that 19th-century historians and mountaineers found most interesting. Scholarship in the late 20th century added further layers of complexity. Petrarch’s letter presents itself as a literal account of what he did on a Friday in 1336, written just a few hours after it occurred.

But modern scholars have suggested the letter was more likely composed in the 1350s when Petrarch was assembling his collection of letters, a decade and a half after its stated date (and after its stated recipient was dead). Readers had long noticed how Petrarch used the details of his climb as an allegory for his own intellectual and spiritual journey. Perhaps, the modern scholars suggested, he didn’t make the climb at all, and the letter was nothing but allegory.

Whether or not he reached the summit in the way he describes, the end of Petrarch’s letter also complicates the impression that he was centuries ahead of his time. If reaching the summit spurred an epiphany that feels familiar for modern mountain lovers, it did not leave Petrarch yearning to accomplish other climbs. Rather, he took from it a lesson about the vanity of such endeavors. “How earnestly should we strive,” he writes, “not to stand on mountain-tops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.”

Hanson agrees that the myth of Petrarch the modern mountaineer relies on an incomplete view. “Read the first page or two of the letter and it sounds very modern,” he says. “If you get all the way to the end, then he seems like a person of his own time.”

By freeing Petrarch’s jaunt up Mont Ventoux from modernist framing, Hanson argues, we can find new ways to appreciate it in terms more relevant for today. “I think Petrarch can be a model of humility rather than a model of individual achievement,” he says. “And if we think of him in those terms, he has something to speak to us about how we engage with nature.”