ALESSANDRO PICCOMINI. - Philologist and man of letters, born in Siena on 13 June 1508, died there on 12 March 1578, after having long lived in Padua and Rome. In Siena, under the name of Stordito, he belonged to the Accademia degli Intronati; and immediately, and not without a touch of bohemianism, he expressed the tendency characteristic of this and almost all the academies of the 16th century to vindicate the claims of the vernacular and to substitute it for Latin.
In fact, in his works only two scientific pamphlets are in Latin; for he was a man of versatile intelligence and varied culture. His verse was Petrarchan, his other prose and juvenile verse negligible; of the two comedies that he certainly wrote, *Alessandro* and *Amor costante*, the latter is noteworthy, in which dialects too are given free rein. The famous *Raffaella* or *Dialogo delle creanze delle donne* (1540) even seemed to put him on the same path as Aretino, and earned him among posterity an ambiguous fame that he does not deserve. With maturity, what was most serious and noble in him came to the surface; and first and foremost a thoughtful love of culture, for which, and for the study of Aristotle, which became second nature to him, he ended up being one of the most significant interpreters of the literary reform. More than the too numerous books *Dell'istituzione morale*, what counts are the late *Annotazioni alla poetica di Aristotele* (1575), in which, in opposition to the frivolous hedonism of Castelvetro, there emerges for the first time, and not as a moral precept but as a reasoned aesthetic conception, the programme of Muratori and of future Italian Romantics, and the true, the beautiful, and the good.