In this video we look at Petrarch (1304-1374), the poet and scholar who has been called ‘the ‘founder of modern European culture’ and even ‘the first modern man’. He was modern not so much because he looked forward but, ironically, because he cast his gaze back, a thousand years and more into the past, to the writers of antiquity. Looking at the ruins of his own civilisation, he believed poets and historians needed to forge a better future by coming to terms with the past, and by making the precious legacy of the past come to life in the present.

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