Francesco Matarazzo
Italian historian
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.
“Francesco Matarazzo” enters the record as italian historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Francesco, Matarazzo and Italian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3750270. VIAF identifies the subject as 14817319. The Library of Congress control number is n82063685. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1443, 1518, 1492 and 1503.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francesco Matarazzo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.