In an article on the date of Machiavelli's Mandragola published recently in this journal, Sergio Bertelli makes reference to an unpublished document concerning Leonardo da Vinci as a military architect. This is a letter that the field commissary Pier Francesco Tosinghi wrote to the Florentine Republic on June 21,1503, reporting Leonardo's visit to the fortress of ‘La Verruca’ on the summit of the Verrucano mountain, about three miles from Pisa. ‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ writes Tosinghi, 'himself and company, came here and we showed him everything, and we think that he likes La Verruca very much, being well fitted to his taste. Afterwards, he said that he was thinking of having it made inexpugnable. But this is something to be set apart for the time being, for the main need is at Librafatta, which is not a small undertaking, nor one to be underestimated.

Our knowledge of the life of Francesco Zambeccari, the noted translator and fabricator of the letters of Libanius, is sketchy at best, and the course of his later years is shrouded in mystery. In 1474 he is known to have taught Greek and Latin literature in Perugia, and in the following year to have obtained a position with King Ferdinand I of Naples.

But when Zambeccari left Perugia, probably in April 1475, he went to Rome and not to Naples, for Ferdinand had already come to Rome to take part in the celebration of the seventh jubilee year of that city. While in Rome Zambeccari worked on his translations of the Libanian letters and consulted with Johannes Argyropoulos concerning them. Here every trace of Zambeccari ends. It is not known whether he ever went to Naples; Foerster's investigations of the archives at Naples and of contemporary letters of prominent Neapolitans have produced only negative results.

No one seems yet to have appreciated that what is the earliest Latin verse of the New World is also its earliest extant verse by any visitor from the Old World. Furthermore, no one has paid any attention to the very poems themselves.

The poet was Alessandro Geraldini (ca. 1455-1524), Italian humanist, diplomat, and churchman. A native of Umbria, Geraldini went to school in Italy, but later left for Spain with his older brother, Antonio, the two bringing with them, like their famous contemporaries Peter Martyr and Marineus Siculus, the influence of the new learning of the Renaissance. At the age of twenty-one, Alessandro served under Ferdinand and Isabella as the Castilians defeated the Portuguese at Toro. He became cupbearer to Isabella, and traveled with Antonio, when the latter was secretary to John II of Aragon, on visits to Francis II, Duke of Brittany, and to Edward IV of England.