Benedetto Varchi

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Benedetto Varchi (1502 or 1503 - 1565) was an Italian historian and poet.

He fought in the defence of has native city, Florence, during the siege by the Mediceans and imperialists in 1530, and was exiled after the surrender of the city. In 1536 he took part in Piero Strozzi's unsuccessful expedition against Medicean rule, but seven years later he was called back to Florence by Cosimo I, who gave him a pension and commissioned him to write a history of the city; the work covers the period from 1527 to 1538. Varchi also wrote a number of plays, poems, dialogues and translations from the classics. His history, in sixteen books, was first published in Florence in 1721.

In his poems, especially the ones in Latin, he expresses his love for other males, often of a pederastic nature. He is thought to have had relations with Giovanni de' Pazzi, the adolescent son of a local aristocrat, who had Varchi knifed upon finding his son stole out of the house to spend his nights with his lover. Varchi survived the attack. Giovanni's place was later taken by Lorenzo Lenzi, the future Bishop of Fermo and papal nuncio in Paris. He was ten years old at the time, and remained friends with Varchi the rest of his life. After a series of other passionate "boyish" affairs he joined the priesthood in order to salvage his reputation. [1]

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.