Ascent of Mont Ventoux

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).

[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.

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.

"[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.

[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.