Experts Exhume Petrarch's Bones

[Lionel]

A team of 14 researchers exhumed the bones of the 14th century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch on Monday, in the attempt to uncover new aspects about his physical appearance and health.As a crane removed the cover of his pink marble casket in Arquà Petrarca, the village near Padua where the poet died in 1374, a skeleton hidden beneath pieces of a molded wooden coffin appeared. "The bones have slid on the marbled bottom. We will have to find a way to remove the pieces of wood and take them out as they are very fragile and could disintegrate at the touch," main scientist Vito Terribile Wiel Marin, professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Padua, told Discovery News. One of the great figures of Italian literature, considered second only to Dante, Petrarch was a great classical scholar and the first modern poet. He wrote hundreds of love poems to Laura — an unidentified and beautiful, but married, lady — describing her as a real woman, far away from the medieval literary conventions that focused only on women's spiritual qualities. In doing so, he perfected the sonnet form that was adopted as an ideal model by later poets such as Shakespeare and Chaucer.

He died 70 years old, pen in hand, in his home in Arquà. Since his body was put in the marble resting place in 1380, after a temporary burial in Arquà's cathedral, Petrarch has been the subject of two other investigations in 1843 and 1873. His remains were dug up again 1943, during WWII, and put in a safe place in the underground rooms of Venice's Ducal Palace. Wiel Marin, who has also directed the exhumation of the body of St. Anthony of Padua in 1981, found the right arm missing — it was hacked off as a souvenir by a drunken friar in 1630 — and the cranium broken into many pieces by the 1853 researchers. "Apart from this, the skeleton is almost intact. Even the cranium's fragments are large enough to make possible a reconstruction," Wiel Marin said.

View: Full Article | Source: Discovery Channel