The Humanist Pompeo Pazzaglia: An Unknown Renaissance Poet

This article introduces the little-known humanist Pompeo Pazzaglia of Bologna (Pompeius Bononiensis). Drawing on the evidence of two collections of his works preserved in miscellaneous manuscripts, it not only reconstructs his biography, but also showcases a selection of his Neo-Latin poems, published and translated here for the first time. Moreover, it publishes some letters and writings which provide new information about book history as well as social, cultural and political events in mid-fifteenth-century Italy, especially in the ambit of Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy, the papal curia and the court of Naples. Pompeo’s previously unstudied writings yield unique insights into such diverse subjects as the decoration and symbolism of the Roman Pantheon and the Palazzo di San Marco, the marriage of Ippolita Maria Sforza and King Ferrante in Naples, the death of Jacopo Piccinino (1465) and the fall of Negroponte to the Ottomans (1471). This study therefore makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on early Renaissance humanism in Rome and Aragonese Naples.