Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429 - 1503) was an important humanist and scholar of Renaissance Italy and a versatile Latin poet of Quattrocento Italy. The poems that were written celebrated love and all the pleasures of life to be found at the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples. This work contains English translation of these poems.
Giovanni Pontano Livres






Dialogues, Volume 2
- 480pages
- 17 heures de lecture
Dialogues, Volume 2 by Giovanni Gioviano Pontano contains both a perceptive treatment of poetic rhythm, the first full treatment of the Latin hexameter in the history of philology, and a discussion of style and method in history writing. This is a new critical edition of the Actius and the first translation into English.
Giovanni Pontano (1426--1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was the most important Latin poet of the fifteenth century as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Aragonese kings of Naples. His Dialogues are our best source for the humanist academy of Naples which Pontano led for several decades.
On Married Love. Eridanus
- 385pages
- 14 heures de lecture
Giovanni Pontano, the dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, wrote two brilliantly original poetical cycles. On Married Love is the first sustained exploration of married love in first-person poetry. Eridanus combines familiar motifs of courtly love with an allusive matrix of classical elegy and Pontano's distinctive vision.
The Virtues and Vices of Speech
- 544pages
- 20 heures de lecture
Giovanni Pontano, best known today as a Latin poet, also composed popular prose dialogues and essays. The De sermone, translated into English here for the first time as The Virtues and Vices of Speech, provides a moral anatomy of aspects of speech such as truthfulness, deception, flattery, gossip, bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule.
Dialogues, Volume 3
- 288pages
- 11 heures de lecture
Dialogues, Volume 3 completes the I Tatti edition of Pontano's five surviving dialogues. It includes Aegidius-which covers topics such as creation, free will, and the immortality of the soul-and Asinus, a fantastical comedy about Pontano going mad and falling in love with an ass. This is the first translation of these dialogues into English.
Eclogues. Garden of the Hesperides
- 320pages
- 12 heures de lecture
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance as well as a leading statesman. Eclogues and Garden of the Hesperides, both broadly inspired by Virgil, might be considered Pontano's love songs to the landscapes of Naples. This volume features the first published translations of both works into English.