Chronicle of an anthropological “cold-case”: Francesco Petrarca died on 19 July 1374 in Arquà, a town in the Euganean Hills of Padua, where he was buried in a marble sarcophagus in front of the church. In 1630 the friar Tommaso Martinelli broke the sarcophagus and stole the bones of his right arm. In 1813 the historian Carlo Leoni decided to restore it and, opening it, he found the well-preserved skull of the poet. The anthropologist Giovanni Canestrini in 1873 was commissioned to study the bone remains of Francesco Petrarca. However, as Canestrini himself wrote in his 1874 publication, “The bones of Francesco Petrarca”, the precious find disintegrated on contact with the air: «The skull, which for five centuries had resisted the demolishing action of time [ …] had become so weak that on 6 December 1873, exposed to the air, it spontaneously disaggregated».
And yet, today we see the plaster cast of Francesco Petrarca’s skull on display in the museum, a cast attributable to Canestrini… how is this possible?
The existence of the cast is the first of the unanswered questions that have emerged during the studies of Petrarch’s remains over the last twenty years.
In 2003 the sarcophagus was reopened and investigated by researchers from the University of Padua. After anthropological analysis, the determination of the sex of the skull is female while that of the postcranial skeleton is male. Furthermore, radiocarbon analysis of the skull establishes that the subject’s death occurred approximately a century before Petrarch (1304–1374).
In 2004 the University of Florence carried out the genetic analysis of the remains: the DNA of the skull is female, while that of the post-cranial skeleton is male.
In the face of so many poor people still to be investigated, what we know for sure is that the anthropological study carried out by Canestrini and the results of the most recent scientific investigations have led to the reconstruction of the poet’s facial features using forensic reconstructive techniques. The science continues…