Francesco Petrarca retired in 1370 to the small country house at Arquà, near Padua, in which he died. The house, its contents, and the great marble sarcophagus erected for his remains outside the parish church brought fame to the village, as Giovanni Boccaccio had prophesied they would. By the fifteenth century literary pilgrims were attracted to the village; in the sixteenth, house and tomb were adomed by Pietro Paolo Valdezocco, and Anton Francesco Doni proposed an elaborate memorial. In the seventeenth, Giacomo Filippo Tomasini described the village and tomb, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the site had become popular with tourists, Lord Byron included. Among the attractions was the mummified corpse of a cat, said to have belonged to the poet.
