True ruin-mindedness begins with the poet Petrarch, the subject along with his successors of the fourth chapter. He was the first person we know of who visited Rome with the intention of seeing the ruins. Thanks to his unrivalled knowledge of Latin literature, he viewed the ruins as ‘sites of memory’, complementary to and made comprehensible by the texts of Roman poets and historians. For Petrarch and his successors, the ruins became an essential part of the historical and cultural heritage of the ancient Romans, a material complement to the history of Livy and the poetry of Virgil. Such complementarity was crucial to endowing the ruins with some context and meaning; they were not just piles of broken rubble but a valuable part of the Roman cultural achievement as a whole. Petrarch’s enthusiasm was infectious and it can be claimed that he initiated two new disciplines, urban topography and antiquarianism, the subjects of the next two chapters, 5 and 6. From this point on, progression will be largely chronological, as the sentiment of ruin-mindedness is developed and enlarged.

The third chapter traces how Petrarch imagines the place of the poet in the period between 1341 and 1353. It begins with Petrarch’s coronation oration as poet laureate of Rome, which has long been recognized as representing the poet’s status in an oscillating temporality between past and present. It argues that this tension in Petrarch’s self-representation is related to his ambiguous stance about appertaining to a city or being situated beyond it. In readings of the coronation oration, the letters surrounding the revolution of Cola di Rienzo, and his major texts on poetry, the chapter shows how Petrarch increasingly distances himself from association with urban environments as places of the masses, even as he becomes more directly involved in politics. With an ideal Rome as his city, he can claim a status that is above and beyond the vulgar concerns of the people of the city. Petrarch’s political language of vituperation against the people coincides with the language of his rejection of the vernacular. After a close reading of the poetics of place in Familiares 10.4 and the related Parthenias, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the defense of poetry in the Invective contra medicum.