Niccolò Perotti

Niccolò Perotti, also Perotto or Nicolaus Perottus (1429 – 14 December 1480) was an Italian humanist and author of one of the first modern Latin school grammars.

Born in Sassoferrato (near Fano), Marche, he studied with Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua in 1443, then in Ferrara with Guarino. He also studied at the University of Padua. At the age of eighteen he spent some time in the household of the Englishman William Grey, later Lord High Treasurer, who was travelling in Italy and was a student of Guarino. He transcribed texts for Grey and accompanied him to Rome when he moved there.

He was a secretary of Cardinal Basilius Bessarion in 1447, and wrote a biography of him in 1472.

From 1451 to 1453 he taught rhetoric and poetry at the University of Bologna. In 1452 he was made Poet Laureate in Bologna by the Emperor Frederick III, as acknowledgment of the speech of welcome he had composed. In 1455 he became secretary to Pope Callixtus III. In 1456 he was ordained, and from 1458 he was Archbishop of Siponto. Occasionally he officiated also as papal governor in Viterbo (1464–69), Spoleto (1471-2) and Perugia (1474–77). He also travelled on diplomatic missions to Naples and Germany.

On behalf of Pope Nicholas V he translated Polybius' Roman History for which the Pope paid him five hundred ducats.

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