ANTONIO da VERCELLI. - Friar Minor, born in the first decades of the 15th century, perhaps in Balocco (province of Vercelli), from which, according to some, he took his name—unless Balocco is a family name, as others maintain. He entered the Order of Friars Minor and seems to have been a lector of theology; he was certainly vicar of the Lombard province, a celebrated preacher, and promoter of the Monti di Pietà. He preached at Orvieto in 1460; at Florence in 1464 and 1478, where he was associated with Lorenzo il Magnifico, whom he urged to be magnanimous toward those guilty of the Pazzi conspiracy; at Parma in 1478; and once again at Orvieto in 1483, where, having reconciled the civic dissensions, he died in the same year.
He himself said that his speech was uncultivated and that he used a rough Latin; and A. Galletti writes that the decline of Franciscan oratory “appears even more serious in him” (L'eloquenza dalle origini al sec. XVI, Milano 1938, p. 259), evidently referring to his sermons printed in Latin, whereas A. da V. preached in the vernacular. He left Lenten sermon collections, various treatises, letters, etc., partly printed and partly in manuscript, and still unpublished. The index of a Lenten collection aeternis fructibus Spiritus Sancti was very ably published in recent times (cf. Archiv. Franciscanum Hist., 36 [1943], 253-72).