Arquà Petrarca
Arquà Petrarca Site Features
Last updated on September 10, 2026Architecture
The village is built on two levels joined by a stepped lane -- an upper part around the church and the tomb, a lower part around the old square, with the slope between them.
The houses are of trachyte, the local volcanic stone, with loggias and external stairs, and they are medieval and Renaissance rather than restored to look so.
Petrarch's house sits at the top, with a loggia added in the sixteenth century by a later owner who understood what he had bought. Inside are frescoes illustrating Petrarch's own writings, and the study preserved as a shrine.
The tomb in the lower square is a plain sarcophagus of red Verona marble on four columns, placed in 1380 -- deliberately outside the church, in the open, where the village passes it.
Around the village the slopes are terraced in dry stone for vines and olives, and that agricultural frame is as protected as the buildings.
Site Features
Petrarch's house
His study, the frescoed rooms, and a view over the hills he chose it for. Small, and the point of the village.
The tomb
Red Verona marble on columns, in the open square below the church, placed six years after his death.
The village itself
Two levels of trachyte houses on a terraced slope, never substantially rebuilt -- which is rarer than it sounds in this part of Italy.
The jujubes
Arquà grows giuggiole, and the October festival is built around them. The local liqueur, brodo di giuggiole, gives Italian the phrase for being overjoyed.
Landscape
Arquà sits on the flank of one of the Euganean Hills, a cluster of extinct volcanic cones rising abruptly from the flat Veneto plain south-west of Padua.
The soil is volcanic and the slopes are terraced for vines, olives and orchards -- the same microclimate that lets olives grow this far north on Lake Garda operates here on a smaller scale.
The village faces south-east across the hills, which is why Petrarch chose the position, and the view from his house has not materially changed.
The hills form a regional park, and the walking routes through them start from the village.