Nardi, Jacopo

NARDI, JACOPO. - Writer, b. in Florence in 1476, d. in Venice in March 1563. He was the most suggestive among the "piagnoni" historians of Florence. At the first expulsion of the Medici he entered, at eighteen, into political life under the shadow of Savonarola. For better or worse he adapted to the first Medicean restoration, in the wings of the Orti Oricellari, where he heard from Machiavelli's own lips the Discorsi sulla prima deca.

At the advent of the second republic (1527) he committed himself against the Medici, and refused any compromise with them, though urged to it. He lived as an exile in Venice, giving Latin lessons and consoling his nostalgia with the narration of the events of his homeland between 1494 and 1532 in the ten books Delle istorie della città di Firenze (1st posthumous ed., 1582). Always with this republican and puritan spirit he worked at a vernacular translation of the first decade of Livy and at a Vita di Antonio Giacomini Tebalducci, the pure soldier of republican Florence. A comedy of his, L'amicizia, perhaps foreshadows Ariosto's Cassaria.

Giuseppe Toffanin