History
Jean Buridan climbed the mountain early in the fourteenth century; Petrarch (accompanied by his brother) repeated the feat on April 26, 1336, and claimed to have been the first to climb the mountain since antiquity. This claim has been widely repeated since.
The 15th century saw the construction of a chapel on the top, dedicated to the Holy Cross.
In 1882, a meteorological station was constructed on the summit, though it is no longer in use. This observatory was planned in 1879, along with a carriage road for access. In the 1960s a 50m-high telecommunications mast was built.
Read more about this topic: Mont Ventoux
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)