thumb|left|Summit of Mont Ventoux Petrarch recounts that on 26 April 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (, a feat which he undertook for recreation rather than necessity.Nicolson, Marjorie Hope; Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1997), p. 49; The exploit is described in a famous letter addressed to his friend and confessor, the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, composed some time after the fact. In it, Petrarch claimed to have been inspired by Philip V of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemo and that an aged peasant had told him that nobody had ascended Ventoux before or after himself, 50 years earlier, and warned him against attempting to do so. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt noted that Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and ascents accomplished during the Middle Ages have been recorded, including that of Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne.Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Translated by S.G.C. Middlemore. Swan Sonnenschein (1904), pp. 301–302.Lynn Thorndike, Renaissance or Prenaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan. 1943), pp. 69–74. JSTOR link to a collection of several letters in the same issue.
thumb|left|Summit of Mont Ventoux Petrarch recounts that on 26 April 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (, a feat which he undertook for recreation rather than necessity.Nicolson, Marjorie Hope; Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1997), p. 49; The exploit is described in a famous letter addressed to his friend and confessor, the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, composed some time after the fact. In it, Petrarch claimed to have been inspired by Philip V of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemo and that an aged peasant had told him that nobody had ascended Ventoux before or after himself, 50 years earlier, and warned him against attempting to do so. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt noted that Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and ascents accomplished during the Middle Ages have been recorded, including that of Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne.Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Translated by S.G.C Middlemore. Swan Sonnenschein (1904), pp. 301–302.Lynn Thorndike, Renaissance or Prenaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan. 1943), pp. 69–74. JSTOR link to a collection of several letters in the same issue.