CECCO d'ASCOLI. – Francesco Stabili, b. at Ascoli in 1269, was a physician, astrologer, naturalist, poet, presumptuous and eccentric. Attached to the Bolognese faculty of Medicine (1324), he was suspended from teaching and fined as a heterodox thinker (16 Dec. 1324); readmitted and promoted to the higher chair (1325), he left Bologna for Florence (1326), where he was appointed physician to Duke Carlo di Calabria; but, having made himself disliked by the duke, by the famous physician Dino del Garbo, and by the Church, he was tried and burned (17 July 1327) as a practitioner of necromancy and a Patarene.
He wrote in Latin a Tractatus in sphaeram, the De principiis astrologiae, and the De eccentricis et epicyclis; in the vernacular, a poem interrupted in its fifth book, L'Acerba, in which, in singularly crude tercets (ABA, CBC,... ZZ), he treats of natural and spiritual things through allegories, obscurity, and polemical thrusts, especially against Dante, and is only rarely moved by nature and by his distant homeland.