CECCHI, GIOVANNI MARIA. — Man of letters, born in Florence, most reliably on 15 March 1518. Following family tradition, he became a notary (1542–1577); he held honorary positions and engaged in mercantile activities in partnership with the Adimari, Segni, and Baldesi families.
His fame rests on his work as a playwright. An admirer of Plautus and Terence, he began with secular comedies, but gradually moved away from strict imitation, guided by his temperament as an observer of contemporary life (cf. the Prologue to *L'Assiulò*, the best of his *Commedie osservate*, though also the most licentious, drawn from a novella by Boccaccio), especially in popular farces. Over time, as his religious piety deepened, he felt remorse for this earlier production and sought to make amends by composing, for the edification and correction of his audience, exclusively sacred plays intended for convents and pious confraternities, not without a blend of biblical and fantastic elements. He revived the tradition of sacred representations, reducing them almost to classical form and modernizing them by adopting blank verse, as in *L'Assiulò della croce* (Florence 1586), which for a long time remained the only one of his sacred dramas to be published. Only in 1895 was a collection issued, notable for *Il figliuol prodigo*, elaborated with his usual playful intrusions and some realistic excesses, based on the Gospel narrative, though failing to evoke its inner pathos.
Much praised in Cecchi is the vividness of his Florentine language, for which he was cited by the Accademia della Crusca. It is worth noting that he also explored historical subjects (*Compendio di più ritratti...*, Bologna 1867) and composed some poetry. He died at his villa in Lastra a Signa on 28 October 1587 and was buried in the church of San Michele, which he had restored and endowed with a small convent.