Pietro Bembo

Born in the family palazzo on the Grand Canal, Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) was the son of Bernardo Bembo, a scholar and ambassador who had such a deep love for Italian literature that he paid for a monument to Dante in Ravenna, the city where the great poet died. His son not only inherited his love, but became a key figure in the Italian Renaissance. He successfully promoted the acceptance of the Tuscan dialect (which he codified) as the literary language for all Italy.

Young Pietro travelled widely with his father; he spent two years in Messina, Sicily to learn ancient Greek, wrote fluently in Latin and attended the University of Padua. While in Sicily he climbed Mt Etna, leading to his first work, De Aetna (On Etna), published by Venice's great Humanist publisher Aldus; together they made it an early version of the affordable pocketbook, printed with a font that still bears Bembo's name—a clean, revolutionary format that made the publishing house a huge success. Bembo later edited Petrarch's Italian poems (1501) and Dante's Terze rime (1502) for Aldus.