Petrarch is credited with the first sport climbing (Mont Ventoux, 1336)
He climbed the mountain "multa videndi ardor ac studium"
http://www.vittoriopacati.it/saggi/pacati_01.html
However, sport climbing is a modern phenomenon.
from the usual culprit, Wikipedia
Petrarch claimed that on April 26, 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (1,909 m; 6,263 ft). He wrote an account of the trip, composed considerably later as a letter to his friend Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. The accuracy of Petrarch's account is open to question; particularly the assertion that he was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since Philip V of Macedon, and that an aged peasant had warned him off the unclimbable mountain. Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and other ascents are recorded from the Middle Ages, including Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne. Jakob Burckhardt's rhapsody on the subject has been often repeated since. [10]
[edit] Mont Ventoux
J.H. Plumb writes in his book The Italian Renaissance of Morris Bishop's version of Petrarch's Ascent of Mont Ventoux showing Petrarch's climb in 1336 was epoch making. [11] This was because Petrarch did this climb on his own volition and not because anything was forced upon him.[dubious – discuss] Petrarch's letter of the ascent to his confessor,[12] the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, rings of aesthetic gratification to grandeur and majesty, [13] a modern attitude that is quoted to this day in many books and journals pertaining to mountaineering.[14]
"For pleasure alone he climbed Mount Ventoux, which rises to more than six thousand feet, beyond Vaucluse. It was no great feat, of course; but he was the first recorded Alpinist of modern times, the first to climb a mountain merely for the delight of looking from its top. (Or almost the first; for in a high pasture he met an old shepherd, who said that fifty years before he had attained the summit, and had got nothing from it save toil and repentance and torn clothing.) Petrarch was dazed and stirred by the view of the Alps, the mountains around Lyons, the Rhone, the Bay of Marseilles. He took St Augustine's Confessions from his pocket and reflected that his climb was merely an allegory of aspiration towards a better life." [6]
In the Confessions, Petrarch's eyes are immediately drawn to the following words:
"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." [12]
Petrarch's response is to turn from the outer world of nature to the inner world of 'soul':
I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again. .... [W]e look about us for what is to be found only within. .... How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation ...[12]
James Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology[15]argues that this rediscovery of the inner world is the real significance of the Ventoux event. The Renaissance begins not with the ascent of Mont Ventoux but with the subsequent descent -- the "return ... to the valley of soul", as Hillman puts it. See also Ascent of Mont Ventoux.
Whether Petrarch's focus on 'soul' is 'modern' depends on what is meant by 'modern', since much of 'modernity' would deny the very existence of subjectivity.
