CASTALDI, PAMFILO. - Italian physician and printer, b. at Feltre around 1398 (Sept. 22?), d. perhaps at Venice after 1479. The scanty information available about him allows only a few certain dates to be established: in 1461, and certainly until 1464, he was at Capodistria and there practiced his profession as a physician; in 1469 he was at Venice, in 1471 at Milan, a printer "cum privilegio" of Galeazzo Maria Sforza; in 1472 he renounced the privilege; in 1474 he was again at Venice.
A legend, founded on a late chronicle by Fr. A. Cambruzzi (Storia di Feltre, Feltre 1674) and on the erroneous interpretation of certain archival documents, sees in C. the inventor of printing: but such a tradition, formed in the second half of the 19th century, has been shown by criticism to be groundless, and is today entirely abandoned. What is still considered possible (if the report is true of two small sheets that he is said to have printed at Capodistria around 1461) is that C. was the first Italian printer: nor can it be excluded that he in a certain sense "reinvented" printing on the basis of news coming from Mainz, without having direct knowledge of Gutenberg's experiments and method.
It seems accepted that there came from his presses, with the collaboration of A. Zarotto, Festus's De verborum significatu, Pomponius Mela's Cosmographia, and the work of L. B. Alberti, which appeared anonymously at Milan in 1471. Probably also due to his work is the edition of Cicero's Epistolae which saw the light at Milan in March 1472 under the name of Filippo di Lavagna, who had associated himself with C. during that period of time.
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Alessandro Pratesi