History & The Arts
The author at home
...work of the writer’s house museum for my latest book. The first writer’s house that admirers visited after he died in 1374 was Petrarch’s in Arqua, Italy. But what did these admirers hope to find? One of the earliest comments on the oddness of this impulse to visit dead authors at home is the elaborate practical joke known as ‘Petrarch’s cat’. This cat was...