Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer--the first map of
Italy is said to have been drawn by his direction--and not only a
reproducer of the sayings of the ancients, but felt himself the
influence of natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature is, for him, the
favorite accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the
two that he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that
he from time to time fled from the world and from his age. We should do
him wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of
describing natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture,
for instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezia and Porto Venere, which he
inserts at the end of the sixth book of the 'Africa,' for the reason
that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it, is no more than a
simple enumeration, but Petrarch is also conscious of the beauty of
rock scenery, and is perfectly able to distinguish the picturesqueness
from the utility of nature. During his stay among the woods of Reggio,
the sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected him that he
resumed a poem which he had long laid aside. But the deep- est
impression of all was made upon him by the ascent of Mont Ventoux, near
Avignon. An indefinable longing for a distant panorama grew stronger
and stronger in him, till at length the accidental sight of a passage
in Livy, where King Philip, the enemy of Rome, ascends the Haemus,
decided him.
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