61 Facts About John Florio

Giovanni Florio, known as John Florio, was an English linguist, poet, writer, translator, lexicographer, and royal language tutor at the Court of James I He is recognised as the most important Renaissance humanist in England.

Playwright and poet Ben Jonson was a personal friend, and Jonson hailed John Florio as "loving father" and "ayde of his muses".

Philosopher Giordano Bruno was a personal friend; John Florio met the Italian philosopher in London, while both of them were residing at the French embassy.

Bruno wrote and published in London his six most celebrated moral dialogues, including La cena de le ceneri, in which John Florio is mentioned as Bruno's companion.

John Florio was born in London in 1552, but he grew up and lived in continental Europe until the age of 19.

John Florio got into trouble with the Inquisition in Italy, after preaching in Naples, Padua, and Venice.

John Florio was a member of the household of William Cecil.

John Florio was dismissed from both on a charge of immorality, but William Cecil later fully forgave him.

John Florio later explained that he learnt the language by reading books.

Michelangelo John Florio then became Italian tutor to Lady Jane Grey and in the family of William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, father of Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke who would become the husband of Mary Sidney, sister of Philip Sidney.

John Florio dedicated a book to Henry Herbert and Jane Grey, his highest-ranking pupils: Regole de la lingua thoscana.

John Florio describes Lady Jane Grey as a martyr and innocent "saint".

Michelangelo John Florio died in 1566, after this date his name is no longer mentioned and in the synod of 1571 he is mentioned as a deceased person.

When he was ten, John Florio was sent to live with and to be schooled in a Paedagogium in Tubingen by the Reformed Protestant theologian, Pier Paolo Vergerio, a native of Venetian Capodistria.

Under these circumstances, John Florio was formed in the humanist cultural circle of Tubingen, in a strong Italianate atmosphere.

John Florio came back to Soglio, and later departed for England in the early 1570s, in possession of a formidable Christian Reformed and humanist education.

At about 19 years old, after his formative years in Soglio and in Tubingen, John Florio came back to London.

At 25 years old John Florio published Firste Fruites which yeelde familiar speech, merie prouerbes, wittie sentences, and golden sayings.

John Florio inscribed the manual to "All Italian gentlemen and merchants who delight in the English tongue".

John Florio dedicated his first work to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

John Florio entered as a poor scholar and became servant and tutor in Italian to Barnabe and Emmanuel Barnes, sons of the Bishop of Durham.

In Oxford, beside his job as Italian tutor, John Florio began a career as translator.

John Florio met Richard Hakluyt, an English writer who was very passionate about maritime literature.

John Florio threw himself early into the spirit of these English patriotic ventures.

Between the summer of 1583 and 1585 John Florio moved with his family to the French embassy.

Walsingham, thanks to John Florio's help, as suggested by Vaughan, was able to intercept and decode Mary's correspondence.

At the French embassy, John Florio embarked in a new, pioneering job as translator of news.

The philosopher, undoubtedly shaped John Florio's character changing his vision of life and world permanently.

John Florio embraced Bruno's philosophy, and above all, the thesis upon the infinite universe and the possibility of life on other planets, theories which went well beyond the Copernican limited heliocentric world.

The friendship that linked Bruno and John Florio is particularly rich and significant.

Similarly, John Florio returned the compliment by introducing the figure of Bruno, "Il Nolano", in Second Fruits.

John Florio portrayed him lounging on a window-seat, leafing through a book and poking fun at his friend John for taking too much time over getting dressed in the morning.

The portrait painted by John Florio is undoubtedly that of a friend.

Also, in his two dictionaries John Florio added many terms as well as Neapolitan dialect words taken from Bruno's works.

Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun was the first to suggest that John Florio had been tutoring the Southampton before 1590.

John Florio points out that in Second Fruits, there is a dialogue between John Florio and Henry, they play tennis together and go to see a play at theatre.

John Florio had a close relationship with Henry Wriothesley at least until 1603, when Henry's family, Florio and other friends of the Southampton, flocked to him when he was released from the Tower.

John Florio was shrewd enough to realise that if his Italian-English dictionary drew much of its vocabulary from such a popular author as Aretino, it would be well received by all those who wished to study first-hand Aretino's lashing satire, bawdy language, and journalistic style.

John Florio became Groom of the Privy Chamber, lived at court, and had a prestigious position at the centre of power.

The higher rate in John Florio's case seems to have been due to his additional functions as reader in Italian and private secretary to the Queen.

John Florio wrote her letters and interviewed people for her.

From Ottaviano Lotti's dispatches, the representative of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in London, we know that John Florio had a major and confidential role with the Queen at court.

John Florio was in close contact with Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, Secretary to the Signoria; their relationship was important as it determined the political relationship between Venice and London at the time.

Ottaviano Lotti, for example, in 1606 asked John Florio to assist with his influence a musician, who wishes to obtain employment at court.

The importance and influence which John Florio's established reputation and his court position gave him are illustrated by the fact that books were now dedicated to him.

John Florio dedicated this work to Florio, reminding him that he had procured a patron for an earlier work of John Healey's His apprentises essay, and hoping that he would do the same by this one.

We thus have Thorpe's evidence that John Florio procured him the Pembroke's patronage.

John Florio secured the patronage of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke for Healey's The Discovery of a New World.

John Florio adds an appropriate eulogy of the 'perfect-unperfect' Arcadia.

John Florio consciously experimented with English, grafting into it words and phrases from other languages.

The sources consulted by John Florio are listed in the work and include books on all phrases of general and specialised knowledge.

John Florio must have possessed a detailed knowledge of Dante, which was unusual at the period.

In 1617, at the age of 65, John Florio married Rose Spicer, his second wife.

John Florio nursed him through his last years and in his will he refers to her in terms of tender affection.

In 1620 John Florio published the translation of Boccaccio's Decameron anonymously.

In 1623, two years before his death, at 70 years old, John Florio made his last will.

John Florio bequeathed his library to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.

Michael Wyatt, in his study "La biblioteca in volgare di John Florio" identified all the editions of the books used by Florio in compiling his dictionaries.

Anthony Wood suggested that John Florio's sepulture was either in the church or in the graveyard of All Saints' Church, Fulham, but so far no stone marks of the resting place has been found and Frances Yates suggested a grimmer alternative: for those victims of the plague, Hurlingham Field was the site of a plague pit and John Florio's bones could "lie in the bed of the lake at Hurlingham".

John Florio's only surviving daughter, Aurelia, married James Molins, a surgeon.

Aurelia John Florio was a midwife and was one of England's most celebrated midwives in the first part of the seventeenth century.