MARULLO, TARCHANIOTA MICHELE. - Born in Constantinople in 1453, died swept away by the waters of the Cecina river in 1500. Because of the arrival of the Turks he came with his family to Italy and began a twofold life as a soldier of fortune and as a genuine humanist. Two destinies clashed within him: that of the Greek exile, who, being of a military family, was naturally inclined to end up a soldier of fortune, however ennobled by the vague expectation of war against the Turks; and that of the man of letters who, having been born with this vocation, could not but aspire to live in an altogether different way. He roamed the world with armed companies and won respect in intellectual circles. For one of the most cultured women of his time, Alessandra Scala, whom he married, he found accents of Pontanian love. His Latin verses, too often diluted in slow elegiac meters, are the best that remains of him. That in his poetry the clash of his two destinies is felt as an inspiring force cannot be said, unless one excepts some accent of acute but generic sadness, and some passage in which the human weariness of war does not prevent warrior courage from being felt as a moral value. His attachment to Lucretius' poem, and the tradition that in many Greeks, especially stradioti, there persisted a certain reluctance toward Christianity, led to a search for traces of such a sentiment in the four books of his Hymni naturales (published in 1497), which, however, are probably nothing but descriptions of nature enlivened (or weighed down) by mythology, in the manner of the less felicitous Pontano.
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Giuseppe Toffanin