Jacopo Sannazaro was born to a prominent family of Naples, Italy, in 1458. Two distinguished classical scholars, Lucio Crasso and Guiniano Maio, educated him. Young Sannazaro showed great promise as a student, pursuing his education despite the death of his father in 1462. In 1470 Sannazaro’s mother moved the family to the Picentine Mountains, north of Salerno, where they could live more economically. By 1478 Sannazaro had returned to Naples, where he joined the Academy of Naples, an intellectual and cultural institution. Sannazaro probably began his pastoral novel, Arcadia, in the 1480s; he also acquired a friend and patron in Prince Frederick of Aragon, who acceded to the throne of Naples in 1496. When competition between France and Spain led to the invasion of Naples in 1501, King Frederick was forced to flee to France; Sannazaro voluntarily followed his king into exile. After Frederick’s death in 1504, Sannazaro returned to Naples to discover that an unauthorized and incomplete edition of his Arcadia had been printed in 1502. He published his approved version in 1504. Sannazaro also became well known for his Piscatorial Eclogues (1526), which transposed the themes of the pastoral to a community of fishermen, and for his Rime (1530), a collection of love poems after the style of Francesco Petrarch’s Canzionere (also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times).
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