Guarino da Verona

When he set out on his return to Italy he was the happy possessor of two cases of precious Greek manuscripts which he had been at great pains to collect; it is said that the loss of one of these by shipwreck caused him such distress that his hair turned grey in a single night. He supported himself as a teacher of Greek, first at Verona and afterwards in Venice and Florence; in 1436 he became, through the patronage of Lionel, marquis of Este, professor of Greek at Ferrara; and in 1438 and following years he acted as interpreter for the Greeks at the councils of Ferrara and Florence. He died at Ferrara on the 14th of December 1460.

His principal works are translations of Strabo and of some of the Lives of Plutarch, a compendium of the Greek grammar of Chrysoloras, and a series of commentaries on Persius, Juvenal, Martial and on some of the writings of Aristotle and Cicero. See Rosmini, Vita e disciplina di Guarino (1805—1806); Sabbadini, Guarino Veronese (1885); Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol. ii. (1908).

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.