Gasparino Barzizza

Gasparino Barzizza (about 1360 to 1431) was an Italian grammarian and teacher of the early humanist movement, born Gasparino di Pietrobuono in the village of Barzizza near Bergamo. He studied grammar and rhetoric at Pavia and taught there from 1403 to 1407, then served as private tutor to the Barbaro family in Venice. From 1407 to 1421 he taught at Padua, where he lectured on rhetoric and on authors such as Seneca, Cicero, Virgil and Terence and set up an elementary school with a humanist curriculum. In 1418 Filippo Maria Visconti invited him to open a similar school at Milan, where he taught from 1421 and also served as court orator. His pupils included Vittorino da Feltre, Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Filelfo and Antonio Beccadelli. He promoted a style of Latin letter writing modelled on Cicero, and his letters and his manual of Latin orthography were used as models for students. He died at Milan around 1431.