Giacomo da Scarperia

Giacomo or Jacopo d'Angelo, better known by his Latin name Jacobus Angelus, was an Italian scholar and humanist during the Renaissance. Named for the village of Scarperia in the Mugello in the Republic of Florence, he traveled to Venice where Manuel Palaeologus's ambassador Manuel Chrysoloras was teaching Greek, the first such course in Italy for several centuries. Da Scarperia returned with Chrysoloras to Constantinople (Istanbul)—the first Florentine to do so—along with Guarino da Verona. In the Byzantine Empire, he studied Greek literature and history under Demetrios Kydones.Coluccio Salutati wrote to urge Da Scarperia to search the libraries there, particularly for editions of Homer and Greek dictionaries, with the result that he translated Ptolemy's Geography into Latin in 1406. He first dedicated it to Pope Gregory IX and then (in 1409) to Pope Alexander V. He also brought new texts of Homer, Aristotle, and Plato to the attention of western scholars.