Venice gave Petrarch a house for his library, the library went to his enemies' heirs and then to France, and the skull in his tomb is a woman's

In 1362 Petrarch offered his books to Venice. The Republic gave him a house on the Riva degli Schiavoni on condition that his works stay in Venice after his death. He left Venice and never sent the books. At his death in 1374 the collection was dispersed. The best part went to Francesco da Carrara, lord of Padua, and in 1388 it passed into the Visconti library at Pavia^†. The Bibliothèque nationale de France says that in autumn 1499 Louis XII of France took Pavia and seized about 400 manuscripts, which went to the château of Blois and later the French royal library. Petrarch was buried in a marble tomb at Arquà. In 1630 a drunken friar, Tommaso Martinelli, and four accomplices broke into a corner of the tomb and took bones to sell. They were tried and exiled. The bones were never recovered. In November 2003 the tomb was opened again. A Padua team and the geneticist David Caramelli found that the rib was male and the skull was female, and that the two came from different people. Their results were published in Forensic Science International in 2007. Petrarch's own skull has not been found.