MATTEO PALMIERI. — Scholar and man of letters, born in Florence to a working-class family on 13 January 1406, died there on 13 April 1475. He held high offices in the Republic (Prior, Gonfalonier of Justice, Ambassador) from 1432 until his death.
A learned humanist and Latin writer, before Alberti he championed the vernacular, composing a noble dialogue on *La vita civile*, in which he imagines that in a villa in the Mugello, in 1430, Agnolo Pandolfini discusses the qualities necessary to form an excellent citizen of a well-ordered republic. Although the doctrines derive from Plutarch, Cicero, and Quintilian, the dialogue is animated by a combined love of family and country and is not unmindful of contemporary reality. It is enlivened by spontaneous reminiscences of Dante, whose footsteps Palmieri later followed—though wearily—in an arid didactic poem, *La città di vita*, which describes a journey he claimed to have made while ambassador to King Alfonso (1455), guided by the Cumaean Sibyl to the Elysian Fields, where she instructs him on the origin and destiny of human souls according to the Neoplatonists and Origen. Composed between 1455 and 1464, the work was entrusted by the author to the Guild of Notaries on condition that it not be opened until after his death; condemned at the time by theologians for its heretical opinion on the origin of souls, it remained unpublished in the Laurentian Library.