Francesco Matarazzo

Francesco Matarazzo or Maturanzio (1443 – August 21, 1518) was an Italian historian of the European Renaissance. His fame rests largely on his masterwork Chronicles of the City of Perugia 1492–1503 which has become a primary source for many later historians of the Italian Renaissance and in particular the city of Perugia.

Life

Although the exact date of his birth in unknown, it is believed that Matarazzo was born about the year 1443 in the small town of Deruta, near Perugia. Little is known of his family, but he is said to have been of noble descent, which would have guaranteed him an extensive education. As a teenager he was chosen to compose the Latin inscriptions that were inscribed beneath the portraits of famous citizens of Perugia that Braccio Baglione had painted to decorate his palace in the city. In 1464 he was teaching in the University of Ferrara and three years later he was assistant to the celebrated humanist teacher Ognibene da Lonigo at Vicenza.

In 1472, he traveled to Greece and settled in Rhodes to study the Greek language. Writing to a friend he reported, "I already speak the language with such fluency that you might think I had been born and brought up in Greece." After wide-ranging travels in the Mediterranean, he settled in Perugia circa 1475 where we find him designated as reverendi domini Perusinae civitatis secretarius dignissimus. The next seventeen years of his life were spent in his native city.

On 7 March 1485, in celebration of the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, Matarazzo delivered the annual encomium in honor of the "angelic doctor" to the members of the Dominican studium generale, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.

In 1486 he was appointed Professor of Rhetoric in the University of Perugia.