brief biographic sketch of Pietro Bembo 1470-1547

Born in 1470 to a noble family and a notable father, Pietro was given the means and education to find a seat in the affairs of his birth city Venice. But he liked books. As a child (1478) he went with his father on diplomatic missions to Florence and later (1487) to Rome. He decided then to pursue literary studues instead of political life and went south to Messina to study with the Byzantine emigre Constantine Lascaris. In 1493 when he was twenty-three years old, he climbed Mt. Aetna. The next year when French troops began to march into Italy, Pietro went back to Venice. There he got Aldus Manutius to publish his book (1496) on his own previous trek up Mt. Aetna.

More studies took him to University in Padua and then Ferrara when his father was stationed there. In Ferrara he met Ariosto and worked on a prose dialogue on love. He also had an affair with the daughter of the pope and wife of the heir to Ferrara, Lucrezia Borgia. He left Ferrara in 1503 to avoid plague. Living in Urbino from 1506-12 he wrote his most famous work in prose on the use of Italian poetry. In this period he also worked with Manutius again, but this time on establishing published texts of Petrarch and Dante after the numerous changes in the fifteenth century.

In 1512 he moved to Rome, published a work praising Cicero as the best model of Roman Latin, and soon, was appointed Latin secretary to Pope Leo X through his connection with his friend Giuliano de'Medici. He was kept busy there for some years as a diplomat and writing the latin correspondence for the Vatican. When Pope Leo died, Bembo retired to Padua and to his wife Ambrogina della Torre, known as Morosina who bore him three children.

He published his work on Italian poetry in 1525, which sparked widespread discussion, wrote some more and won a number of prizes and benefices. One of these was the history commissioned by the City of Venice. This he completed for the years 1485-1513 in twelve books. In 1538 he returned to Rome, was made a cardinal and stayed with that work until his death in 1547. Pietro Bembo was buried in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. There's a family of fonts named after him too, apparently.