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.
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 were following, Petrarch ever trying for an easier, if longer, path. [1] At the top, they found a peak called Filiolus, "Little Son"; Petrarch reflected on the past ten years and the waste of his earthly love for Laura. They looked out from that spot, seeing the Rhone and the Cévennes, but not the Pyrenees (which are 200 miles away). At this point, Petrarch sat down, opened Augustine's Confessions, and immediately came upon "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, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." [2] Petrarch fell silent on the trip down, reflecting on the vanity of human wishes and the nobility of uncorrupted human thought. When they arrived back in the village in the middle of the night, Petrarch wrote this letter "hastily and extemporaneously" - or so he says. [3]
It is often claimed that Petrarch was the first to climb Mont Ventoux, although he did not suggest so himself. The mountain was likely already climbed in prehistoric times. There is even a slightly older written account of an ascent by Jean Buridan, who, on his way to the papal court in Avignon before the year 1334, climbed Mt. Ventoux "to make some meteorological observations." [4] [5] It seems implausible that Petrarch sat down and wrote the six thousand words we have, in elegant Latin with correct quotations from the classical poets, before dinner after an eighteen-hour hike up and down a mountain. [6] In fact, whether Petrarch himself climbed the mountain has been doubted by modern scholars; according to Pierre Courcelle and Giuseppe Billanovich, the letter is essentially a fiction written almost fifteen years after its supposed date, and almost a decade after the death of its addressee, Francesco Dionigi da Borgo San Sepulcro. [7] Lyell Asher argued, indeed, that the ascent of the mountain was a figurative account of writing the letter itself. [8]
Jakob Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy declared Petrarch "a truly modern man" because of the significance of nature for his "receptive spirit"; even if he did not yet have the skill to describe nature. [9] Petrarch's implication that he was the first to climb mountains for pleasure, [10] and Burckhardt's insistence on Petrarch's sensitivity to nature have been often repeated since. [11] There are also numerous references to Petrarch as an "alpinist",. [12] However Mont Ventoux is not a hard climb, and is not usually considered part of the Alps. [13] This implicit claim of Petrarch and Burckhardt, that Petrarch was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since antiquity, was disproven by Lynn Thorndike in 1943. [14]
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg describes Petrarch's ascent of Ventoux as "one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs," namely between the medieval period and modernity. He also uses it to illustrate his theory of intellectual history: "The description of the ascent of Mont Ventoux exemplifies graphically what is meant by the 'reality' of history as the reoccupation of formal systems of positions." [15]
James Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology , uses the story of Petrarch's ascent to illustrate his argument that the outer world of nature is mirrored by an equally vast inner world of images. Both worlds exist apart from the human being. The outer world may have motivated Petrarch to climb Mont Ventoux, but the inner world is what he discovered when he reached the top and read the passage from Augustine's Confessions . [16]
The findings support this argument, that aesthetic experiences of nature and landscape can also be found in medieval accounts, such as the ascent of the volcanic mountain Vulcano by the Dominican friar Burchard of Mount Sion. [17] Therefore, what is new for Petrarch compared to medieval reports is the artistic representation of his mountain ascent as a subjective experience of autonomy.
Francesco Petrarca, commonly anglicized as Petrarch, was a scholar and poet of the early Italian Renaissance, and one of the earliest humanists.
Vulcano or Vulcan is a small volcanic island belonging to Italy in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about 20 km (12 mi) north of Sicily and located at the southernmost end of the seven Aeolian Islands. The island is known for its volcanic activity and contains several volcanic calderas, including one of the four active volcanoes in Italy that are not submarine. The English word "volcano", and its equivalent in several European languages, derives from the name of this island, which derives from the Roman belief that the tiny island was the chimney of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. In November 2021, 150 people were evacuated from the island's harbour area due to increased volcanic activity and gases; an amber alert had been issued in October 2021 after several significant changes in the volcano's parameters.
Hiking is a long, vigorous walk, usually on trails or footpaths in the countryside. Walking for pleasure developed in Europe during the eighteenth century. Religious pilgrimages have existed much longer but they involve walking long distances for a spiritual purpose associated with specific religions.
Mont Ventoux is a mountain in the Provence region of southern France, located some 20 km northeast of Carpentras, Vaucluse. On the north side, the mountain borders the department of Drôme. At 1,910 m (6,270 ft), it is the highest mountain in the region and has been nicknamed the "Beast of Provence", the "Giant of Provence", or "The Bald Mountain". It has gained fame through its inclusion in the Tour de France cycling race; in 2009 it was the scene of the first penultimate-day mountain top finish in the Tour de France, with Alberto Contador sealing his yellow jersey.
In mountaineering and climbing, a first ascent, is the first successful documented climb to the top of a mountain or the top of a particular climbing route. Early 20th-century mountaineers and climbers were focused on reaching the tops of iconic mountains and climbing routes by whatever means possible, often using considerable amounts of aid climbing, and/or with large expedition style support teams that laid "siege" to the climb.
The Grossglockner, or just Glockner, is, at 3,798 metres above the Adriatic (12,461 ft), the highest mountain in Austria and the highest mountain in the Alps east of the Brenner Pass. It is part of the larger Glockner Group of the Hohe Tauern range, situated along the main ridge of the Central Eastern Alps and the Alpine divide. The Pasterze, Austria's most extended glacier, lies on the Grossglockner's eastern slope.
Gaston Rébuffat was a French alpinist, mountain guide, and author. He is well known as a member of the first expedition to summit Annapurna 1 in 1950 and the first man to climb all six of the great north faces of the Alps. In 1984, he was made an officer in the French Legion of Honour for his service as a mountaineering instructor for the French military. At the age of 64, Gaston Rébuffat died of cancer in Paris, France. The climbing technique Gaston was named after him. A photo of Rébuffat atop the Aiguille du Roc in the French Alps is on the Voyager Golden Records.
Lynn Thorndike was an American historian of medieval science and alchemy. He was the son of a clergyman, Edward R. Thorndike, and the younger brother of Ashley Horace Thorndike, an American educator and expert on William Shakespeare, and Edward Lee Thorndike, known for being the father of modern educational psychology.
Mark Twight is an American climber, writer and the founder of Gym Jones. He rose to prominence as a mountaineer in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a series of difficult, dangerous alpine climbs in various ranges around the world. His radical, light-weight approach to alpinism has seen him regarded as an influential figure in the single-push movement.
Epistolae familiares is the title of a collection of letters of Petrarch which he edited during his lifetime. He originally called the collection Epistolarum mearum ad diversos liber but this was later shortened to the current title.
The Liber sine nomine is a collection of nineteen personal letters written in Latin by the fourteenth century Italian poet and Renaissance humanist Petrarch. The letters being harshly critical of the Avignon papacy, they were withheld from the larger collection of his Epistolae familiares and assembled in a separate book. In this fashion, Petrarch reasoned, a reader could throw away this collection, and the other letters to friends could be preserved for posterity.
The Dent du Géant is a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif in France and Italy.
The golden age of alpinism was the decade in mountaineering between Alfred Wills's ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 and Edward Whymper's ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, during which many major peaks in the Alps saw their first ascents.
Fontaine-de-Vaucluse is a commune in the southeastern French department of Vaucluse. In 2018, it had a population of 585. Its name comes from the spring of the same name; the name Vaucluse itself comes from the Latin phrase vallis clausa or "closed valley".
Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro OESA was an Augustinian friar who was at one time Petrarch's confessor, and who taught Boccaccio at the beginning of his education in the humanities. He was Bishop of Monopoli in Apulia. He was surnamed, not uncommonly for the trecento, for the town in which he was born, now Sansepolcro in Tuscany. His family name was de' Roberti, which no longer exists. Dionigi is the Italian form of Dennis, Latin Dionysius.
Edward Shirley Kennedy (1817–1898) was an English mountaineer and author, and a founding member of the Alpine Club.
Robert Lindley Murray Underhill was an American mountaineer best known for introducing modern Alpine style rope and belaying techniques to the U.S. climbing community in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Patrick Gabarrou a.k.a. "Le Gab", is a French mountaineer and mountain guide who is credited with more than 300 first ascents, most of them in the Mont Blanc massif.
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