Pier Angelo Manzo(l)li was a fictitious Italian author.
There has never been an Italian author Pier Angelo Manzo(l)li. The author of Zodiacus vitae is the Neapolitan poet Marcello Stellato, in latin Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus (born ca. 1500 - died in Cesena before 1551)[1][2]. Pier Angelo Manzolli was imagined by Jacopo Facciolati in eighteenth-century[3].
Zodiacus vitae is a Latin poem divided into 12 books, one for each sign of the zodiac, published at Basel in 1543, but first published in Venice in 1536, and dedicated to Ercole II d'Este, duke of Ferrara. The didactic poem addresses the subject of human happiness in connection with scientific knowledge, and combines metaphysical speculation with satirical attacks on ecclesiastical hypocrisy, and especially on the Popes and Martin Luther.
It was translated into several languages, but fell under the ban of the Inquisition on the ground of its rationalizing tendencies. In 1551, after Stellato's death, the Catholic Church burned his heretical bones and Pope Paul IV placed his book in the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, ("Index of Prohibited Books"), in 1559.
Latin Wikiquote has quotations related to: Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus