  Girolamo Cardano was born in Pavia in 1501 from Fazio and Chiara Micheri. Chiara delivered her baby in Pavia, in the house of family friends, and not in Milan, to defuse a possible scandal concerning the illegitimate birth. Fazio would marry Chiara and recognize Girolamo only later in 1524, just before his death. After a difficult childhood, saddened by frequent illnesses and the harsh upbringing by his overbearing father, Cardano enrolled at the University of Pavia to study medicine in 1520 against his father’s wish. Fazio (1445–1524), a jurist and an accomplished practitioner of mathematics and natural philosophy (in 1480 he had published an edition of John Peckham’s Perspectiva communis (“General Optics”), written around 1265), wanted his son to undertake studies of law, but Girolamo felt more attracted to philosophy and science. When, due to the ongoing war between France and Spain, the authorities in Pavia were forced to close the university, Cardano resumed his studies at the University of Padua, where he graduated in medicine in 1526. For about six years, he practised as a physician in Saccolungo, a village close to Padua, where he met and married Lucia Bandareni (1531). Three children were born from this marriage: Giovanni Battista (1534), Chiara (1537) and Aldo (1543). In the meantime, Cardano had been trying several times to become a member of the College of Physicians in Milan, but his applications had always been turned down, adding to his professional frustration and disappointment. Rejections notwithstanding, he moved back to Milan with his family in 1532. He divided his time between practising medicine in Gallarate, a town nearby Milan, and teaching mathematics in the Piattine schools of Milan, a charitable institution founded by the nobleman Tommaso Piatti in 1501 to improve knowledge of Greek, logic, astronomy, and mathematics among Milanese students from a poor background. Fazio, too, had previously taught in this school. In the meantime, his reputation as a successful practitioner in medicine began to spread among the important families of Milan. In 1539 his application to become a member of the College of Physicians was finally accepted. Discontinuously, from 1543 to 1551, he taught medicine at the University of Pavia, until 1552, when he went to Scotland to treat the Archbishop of Edinburgh, John Hamilton, who was suffering from a particularly severe form of asthma. Back to Milan in 1553, he resumed teaching in Pavia in 1559. In 1560 his son Giovanni Battista was executed charged with the murder of his wife, Brandona Seroni, whom, against his father’s will, he had married in 1557. This tragic event represented a turning point in Cardano’s life and intellectual career. In 1562, he decided to leave Pavia, whose academic environment had become increasingly hostile, to teach medicine in Bologna. As a result of mounting suspicions that he was actively spreading heretical views, he was arrested on 6 October 1570 and remained in prison until 22 December of the same year. In February 1571, before the Sacred Congregation led by Antonio Baldinucci, Cardano was required to acknowledge and reject his serious crimes against the faith (abiura de vehementi), having been declared “vehemently suspect of heresy.” He solemnly swore that he would no longer teach and publish books until his death. In 1571 he went to Rome to serve as personal physician to Pope Pius V and then Pope Gregory XIII. After having been admitted to the College of Physicians in 1575, he died in Rome, on 20 September 1576, devoting his last energies (from September 1575 to May 1576) to write his autobiography, De vita propria, published posthumously by Gabriel Naudé in 1643.