1. Fausto Veranzio was a Croatian polymath, diplomat and bishop from Sibenik, then part of the Republic of Venice.
16 Facts About Fausto Veranzio
1. 2.
Fausto Veranzio is a scientist recognised for his genius as both a Croatian and as a Croatian-Hungarian.
3.
Fausto Veranzio's father was a Latin poet, while his uncle was Antun Vrancic, archbishop of Esztergom, a diplomat and a civil servant, who was in touch with Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, and Nikola IV Zrinski, who took care of Fausto's education and later travelled with him during some of Antun's travels through Hungary and in the Republic of Venice.
4.
Later in his life, in 1578, Fausto was married to Marieta Zar with whom had a daughter Alba-Roza, and possibly a son, who died young.
5.
At the court of King Rudolf II, at the Hradcany castle in Prague, Fausto Veranzio was the chancellor for Hungary and Transylvania, often in contact with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe.
6.
Fausto Veranzio died in 1617 in Venice and was buried in Dalmatia, near his family's country house on the island of Prvic.
7.
Fausto Veranzio's ideas included a float resembling a modern lifebuoy, boats with ingenious power mechanisms relying on water currents, and a rotary printer intended to improve on the printing press.
8.
Paolo Guidotti had already attempted to carry out the idea, ending by falling on a house roof and breaking his thigh bone ; but while Francis Godwin was writing his flying romance The Man in the Moone, Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have performed an actual parachute-jumping experiment and, therefore, to be the first man to build and test a parachute.
9.
Fausto Veranzio envisioned windmills with both vertical and horizontal axes, with different wing constructions to improve their efficiency.
10.
Fausto Veranzio tackled the problem of the wells and water supply of Venice, which is surrounded by sea.
11.
Fausto Veranzio drew proposals which predated the actual construction of modern suspension bridges and cable-stayed bridges by over two centuries.
12.
Fausto Veranzio designed the concept to modern tied-arch bridges, through arch bridges, truss bridges and aerial lifts.
13.
In particular, Fausto Veranzio listed in the Dictionarium 304 Hungarian words that he deemed to be borrowed from Croatian.
14.
Also, at the end of the book, Fausto Veranzio included Croatian language versions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria and the Apostles' Creed.
15.
Only a few of Fausto Veranzio's works related to history remain: Regulae cancellariae regni Hungariae and De Slavinis seu Sarmatis in Dalmatia exist in manuscript form, while Scriptores rerum hungaricum was published in 1798.
16.
In Logica nova and Ethica christiana, which were published in a single Venetian edition in 1616, Fausto Veranzio dealt with the problems of theology regarding the ideological clash between the Reformation movement and Catholicism.