Arquà Petrarca Culture

Arquà's culture is one man and one crop. Petrarch — scholar, poet, and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists, whose rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited with initiating the fourteenth-century Italian Renaissance — spent his last four years here and died here in 1374. His house is a museum; his tomb stands in the lower square. The village has been a literary pilgrimage ever since, formally so since it took his name in 1870.

The other half is agricultural and seasonal. Local produce runs to olives and extra virgin olive oil, honey, chestnuts and ziziphus — the jujube, from which the village makes the brodo di giuggiole it is famous for. The autumn harvest is the time the village is most itself and most visited at once.