[Footnote 109: _De Capessendâ Libertate_, _Hortatoria_, p. 535.]
[Footnote 110: See Petrarch's _Epistle to the Roman People_, p. 712.]
The interest excited in Petrarch by the sight of Rome's ruins was important for his humanistic ideal. They stirred him as a moralist, an antiquarian, and a man who owed his mental vigour to the past. He tells how often he used to climb above the huge vaults of the Baths of Diocletian in company with his friend Giovanni Colonna.[111] Seated there among the flowering shrubs and scented herbs that clothed decay with loveliness, they held discourse concerning the great men of old, and deplored the mutability of all things human. Whatever the poet had read of Roman grandeur was brought back to his mind with vivid meaning during his long solitary walks. He never doubted that he knew for certain where Evander's palace stood, and where the cave of Cacus opened on the Tiber. The difficulties of modern antiquarian research had not been yet suggested, and his fancy was free to map out the topography of the seven hills as pleased him best. Yet he complained that nowhere was less known about Rome than in Rome itself.[112] This ignorance he judged the most fatal obstacle to the resurrection of the city.[113] The palaces where dwelt those heroes of the past, had fallen into ruins; the temples of the gods were desecrated; the triumphal arches were crumbling; the very walls had yielded to decay. None of the Romans cared to arrest destruction; they even robbed the marble columns and entablatures in order to deck Naples with the spoils.[114] The last remnants of the city would soon, he exclaimed, be levelled with the ground. Time has been unable to destroy them; but man was ruining what Time had spared.[115]
[Footnote 111: _Epist. Fam._ lib. ii. 14, p. 605; lib. vi. 2, p. 657.]
[Footnote 112: 'Qui enim hodie magis ignari rerum Romanarum sunt, quam Romani Cives? Invitus dico, nusquam minus Roma cognoscitur quam Romæ.' _Epist. Fam._ lib. ii. 14, p. 658.]
[Footnote 113: 'Quis enim dubitare potest, quin illico surrectura sit si coeperit se Roma cognoscere?' _Ibid._]
[Footnote 114: 'Vi vel senio collapsa palatia, quæ quondam ingentes tenuere viri, diruptos arcus triumphales ... indignum de vestris marmoreis columnis, de liminibus templorum, ad quæ nuper ex toto orbe concursus devotissimus fiebat, de imaginibus sepulchrorum, sub quibus patrum vestrorum venerabilis cinis erat, ut reliquas sileam, desidiosa Neapolis adornatur.' _Ibid._ p. 536.]