At last, after having formed a kind of labyrinth, they all meet, and pour themselves into the same reservoir." John Visconti had chosen this situation whereon to build a Carthusian monastery.

This was what tempted Petrarch to found here a little establishment.

He wished at first to live within the walls of the monastery, and the Carthusians made him welcome to do so; but he could not dispense with servants and horses, and he feared that the drunkenness of the former might trouble the silence of the sacred retreat.

He therefore hired a house in the neighbourhood of the holy brothers, to whom he repaired at all hours of the day.

He called this house his Linterno, in memory of Scipio Africanus, whose country-house bore that name.