The return of the Pope to Rome appeared to the contemporary world both as a great event and a religious action. “When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from among the strange people”: with these words from Psalm cxiv. Petrarch began his letter of congratulation to Urban, who had only now become the Vicar of Christ and successor of S. Peter, and had cancelled the sins of five predecessors and of sixty years in a single day. The zealous Italian again defended his native country. He said that it was childish even to compare France and Italy; since everything glorious that the world possessed, all art and learning, were due to the Italians ; the greatest poets, the orators, the philosophers, the Fathers of the Church were of Latin race, and the empire, like the Papacy, a Latin product. The French already called Italy the land of the dead; but if even Petrarch was forced to lament that, owing to wars and the long absence of emperors and popes, Rome was reduced to ruin, he pointed with pride to the flourishing vigour of Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Genoa. He exhorted the Pope to repopulate and restore Rome, the most beautiful place, according to Virgil, on which the sun shone, and also to revive her ancient and honoured customs.