Petrarch

Petrarch was an Italian poet and scholar who spent his youth at the papal court in Avignon, saw Laura in a church there in 1327 and wrote the Canzoniere to her for the rest of his life, was crowned poet laureate on the Capitol in Rome, and searched the monasteries of Europe for the lost manuscripts of Cicero and Livy. He is called the first humanist and the first modern man. The Ascent of Mont Ventoux, a letter of 1336 describing a climb undertaken for the view and ending, with Augustine’s Confessions open in his hand, in self-examination, is the moment the modern relation to landscape and to the self is often said to begin.