The first man of letters? Petrarch clasps his legacy in this 19th century painting.

      His letters to his friends are nothing if not parchment postcards home, and he writes not as one who has observed novel native customs as he flits through Europe conducting important business, but as a pleasure seeker, a holidaymaker, a flaneur. He travels to Paris, the Low Countries and the Rhine, he climbs mountains, he reports back. The only thing that prevents him travelling further – to Jerusalem, for example – is his terrible sea-sickness. ‘Would that you could know,’ he writes to one friend, ‘with what delight I wander, free and alone, among the mountains, forests, and streams.’ His letters become travel guides, itineraries and mental maps, and an early form of anthropology.

      ‘I then proceeded to Cologne,’ he writes to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in the summer of 1333,

      which lies on the left bank of the Rhine, and is noted for its situation, its river, and its inhabitants. I was astonished to find such a degree of culture in a barbarous land. The appearance of the city, the dignity of the men, the attractiveness of the women, all surprised me.

      The day of my arrival happened to be the feast of St John the Baptist. It was nearly sunset when I reached the city . . . I allowed myself to be led immediately from the inn to the river, to witness a curious sight. And I was not disappointed, for I found the riverbank lined with a multitude of remarkably comely women. Ye gods, what faces and forms! And how well attired! One whose heart was not already occupied might well have met his fate here.

      I took my stand upon a little rise of ground where I could easily follow what was going on. There was a dense mass of people, but no disorder of any kind. They knelt down in quick succession on the bank, half hidden by the fragrant grass, and turning up their sleeves above the elbow they bathed their hands and white arms in the eddying stream.

      . . . When anything was to be heard or said I had to rely upon my companions to furnish both ears and tongue. Not understanding the scene, and being deeply interested in it, I asked an explanation from one of my friends . . . He told me that this was an old custom among the people, and that the lower classes, especially the women, have the greatest confidence that the threatening calamities of the coming year can be washed away by bathing on this day in the river, and a happier fate be so assured. Consequently this annual ablution has always been conscientiously performed, and always will be.

      In whatever high regard we may hold Petrarch’s letters, it would be hard to match the regard in which he held them himself. He desired that his readers, whom he thought of as predominantly male,

      should think of me alone, not of his daughter’s wedding, his mistress’s embraces, the wiles of his enemy, his engagements, house, lands or money. I want him to pay attention to me. If his affairs are pressing, let him postpone reading the letter, but when he does read, let him throw aside the burden of business and family cares, and fix his mind upon the matter before him . . . I will not have him gain without any exertion what has not been produced without labour on my part.

      His letters usually run to well over a thousand words. The well-hashed line ‘Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a short one’, has been attributed in various forms to Blaise Pascal (1657), John Locke (1690), William Cowper (1704) and Benjamin Franklin (1750), but the thought may have originated – in a naturally elongated form – with Petrarch. Writing again to Boccaccio towards the end of his writing life, aware that his time was now limited, he resolved to keep his letters tight, and to ‘write to be understood and not to please’. Yet he remembered making that promise before: ‘But I have not been able to keep this engagement. It seems to me much easier to remain silent altogether with one’s friends than to be brief, for when one has once begun, the desire to continue the conversation is so great that it were easier not to begin than to check the flow.’

      He encountered other difficulties too. Too often he would write letters and they would not make it to their inattentive readers at all, their carrier having been intercepted by anxious agents of the state or random Italian highwaymen, or even an early incarnation of the autograph hunter. Not long before his death, Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio that a combination of old age and the perennial unreliability of the messenger system had resigned him to a regretful fate: he would write letters no more.

      I know now that neither of two long letters that I wrote to you have reached you. But what can we do? Nothing but submit. We may wax indignant, but we cannot avenge ourselves. A most insupportable set of fellows has appeared in northern Italy, who nominally guard the passes, but are really the bane of messengers.

      They not only glance over the letters that they open, but they read them with the utmost curiosity. They may, perhaps, have for an excuse the orders of their masters, who, conscious of being subject to every reproach in their restless careers of insolence, imagine that everyone must be writing about and against them; hence their anxiety to know everything. But it is certainly inexcusable, when they find something in the letters that tickles their asinine ears, that instead of detaining the messengers while they take time to copy the contents, as they used to do, they should now, with ever increasing audacity, spare their fingers the fatigue, and order the messengers off without their letters. And, to make this procedure the more disgusting, those who carry on this trade are complete ignoramuses . . . I find nothing more irritating and vexatious than the interference of these scoundrels. It has often kept me from writing, and often caused me to repent after I had written. There is nothing more to be done against these letter thieves, for everything is upside down, and the liberty of the state is entirely destroyed.

      The liberty of the state destroyed by an uncertain postal service? Even allowing for the odd flourish of Italian melodrama, it did appear that the value of letters – their role in cultural discourse as much as their importance in official affairs – was now something a civilised world at the dawn of the Renaissance could not do without. And this was just the beginning: the worth of letters to historical record, the danger of letters to a nervous monarchy, the importance of a reliable delivery network for the passionate expression of love – all these were just starting to be assessed. Clearly, a growth in literacy was going to be both a blessing and a curse.

How to Build a Pyramid

      14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 330 WING,

      1 COY., 9 A.F.S., M.E.F.

      17th December 1943

      Dear Bessie,

      I received yesterday your surface letter of 20th October. I read it avidly as from an old pal – noting that though time has chattanooga’ed along, your style remains pretty much as it was in the days when we had that terrifically intense and wonderfully sincere correspondence about Socialism and the Rest Of It – unlike the present time, when, hornswoggling old hypocrite that I am, the Rest Of It seems infinitely more attractive. Thanks for the letter, old-timer, I am sending this by Air Mail because it will have enough dull stuff in it to sink a Merchant ship.

      Yes, I remember our discussions over ‘Acquaintance’ and my views are still as much for as yours remain against. I have, perhaps, one hundred acquaintances (I write to fifty) yet I could number my friends on one hand. The dictionary:

      Acquaintance: a person known.

      Friend: one attached to another by affection and esteem.

      You are ‘known’ to me, and while I have ‘affection’ for you it does not amount to an attachment. You hung on to my coat tails ‘in friendship’, you say?

      I am sorry that Nick and you are ‘no longer’, as you put it, and that you should have wasted so much time because of his lack of courage. You must have had a rotten time