PALMIERI, MATTEO. — Man of letters, born in Florence into a humble 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 writer in Latin, he worked, before Alberti, in favor of the vernacular, writing a noble dialogue on La vita civile, in which he imagines that, in a villa in the Mugello in 1430, Agnolo Pandolfino discusses the qualities necessary to form an excellent citizen of a well-ordered republic. Although its doctrines derive from Plutarch, Cicero, and Quintilian, the dialogue is animated by a combined love of family and country and does not lose sight of the realities of contemporary life. Spontaneous reminiscences of Dante flourish in it; later P. laboriously followed Dante’s footsteps in a dry didactic poem, La città di vita, in which is described a journey he is said to have undertaken while he was ambassador to King Alfonso (1455), guided by the Cumaean Sibyl as far as the Elysian Fields, where she instructed him concerning the origin and destiny of human souls according to the Neoplatonists and Origen. The work, composed between 1455 and 1464, was entrusted by its author to the guild of notaries, on condition that it not be opened until after his death; then condemned by the theologians for its heretical opinion concerning the origin of souls, it remained unpublished in the Laurentian Library.
BIBLI. La vita civile, edited by F. Battaglia, Bologna 1944; E. Frizai, «La città di vita», poema inedito di M. P., in Propagatore, 11 (1878), p. 140 ff. Studies; E. Bottari, M. P., in Atti dell'Arcademia Lucchese, 24 (1886), p. 408 ff.; A. Messeri, M. P. cittadino di Firenze del sec. XV, in Arch. stor. it., 5ª series, 13 (1894), p. 257 ff.; G. Boffito, L'eresia di M. P., in Giorn. stor. d. lett. it., 37 (1901), p. 1 ff.; V. Zabughin, Storia del Rinascimento cristiano in Italia, Milan 1924, p. 153 ff.