NARDI, JACOPO

NARDI, JACOPO. - Writer, born in Florence in 1476, died in Venice in March 1563. He was the most evoca-

tive among the "piagnoni" historians of Florence. Upon the first expulsion of the Medici, at the age of eighteen, he entered political life under the shadow of Savonarola. He adapted himself, for better or for worse, to the first Medici restoration behind the scenes of the Orti Oricellari, where he heard the Discourses on the First Decade from the living voice of Machiavelli.

Upon the advent of the second republic (1527) he committed himself against the Medici, and refused to compromise with them, although urged to do so. He lived in exile in Venice, giving Latin lessons and comforting his nostalgia by recounting the events of his homeland between 1494 and 1532 in the ten books of Delle istorie della città di Firenze (1st posth. ed., 1582). Always with this republican and puritan spirit, he worked on a vernacular translation of Livy's first decade and on a Vita di Antonio Giacomini Tebalducci, the pure soldier of republican Florence. One of his comedies, L'amicizia, perhaps anticipates Ariosto's Cassaria.