ZANCHI, GIROLAMO. – Italian Protestant, born in Alzano di Bergamo in 1516, died at Heidelberg on 19 November 1590.
He entered the Canons Regular at Bergamo in 1531; having completed his studies together with the Brescian Celso Martinengo, he went to Lucca in 1541, VERMIGLI, PIETRO MARTIRE (v.) and was able to read the writings of Bucer, Melanchthon’s Loci, Bucer’s De origine erroris, and later Calvin’s Institutio. He remained at Lucca even after Vermigli’s flight. He left Italy in October 1555, when Martinengo too had to leave Milan, where he was preaching; he found refuge among the Grisons and then went to Strasbourg as a teacher of Old Testament exegesis. There he married the daughter of Celio Secondo Curione, and when she died in 1556 he married again. He protested that he was neither Lutheran, nor Zwinglian, nor Calvinist, but christianus igitur sum non sectarius; in reality he followed the Zwinglian-Calvinist tendency and, unlike many other Italians, he was, like Vermigli, always intolerant within the limits of the Protestant ecclesiastical organizations, while not failing to deplore their factionalism and perpetual disagreements. At Strasbourg, in 1561, he met the papal nuncio Delfino, with whom he discussed, without result, the participation of Protestants in the Council of Trent. When Agostino Mainardi died at Chiavenna in July 1563, Z. succeeded him in governing the community; but at the beginning of 1568 he went to Heidelberg, where he taught for ten years. His works were printed at Geneva in 1617 and 1619 and include letters, treatises, and theological opinions that he wrote at the request of communities and private individuals in the name of the Faculty of Theology of Heidelberg. Z. must be distinguished from the humanist Basilio Z., also from Bergamo and a Canon Regular, who died in Rome in 1558.