Born on the island of Cherso, or Cres, off the coast of Dalmatia, in 1529, Francesco Patrizi began his initial scholarly training in his home city, followed by studies in Venice and Ingolstadt, before enrolling at the University of Padua in 1547. Although he initially intended to study medicine, he quickly turned to the humanities, learning Greek and beginning the systematic analysis of philosophical texts which would come to be the major preoccupation of his professional life. He spent seven years at Padua working with an outstanding faculty in Aristotelian philosophy while engaging in discussions with thinkers devoted to the study of Plato and other alternative philosophical sources. He later travelled to several other Italian cities and moved to Cyprus, where he was able to strengthen his knowledge of Greek and assemble a collection of Greek manuscripts (Muccillo 1993). Following two excursions to Spain, during which he sold a major portion of his Greek manuscripts to Philip II, he was offered an appointment to teach Platonic philosophy at the University of Ferrara in 1578, a position he held until invited by Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini to accept a similar assignment at the University of Rome, the “Sapienza”, in 1592. He spent the last years of his life as one of the very few philosophers teaching Platonism in a university setting in late sixteenth-century Italy, passing away in 1597 while still engaged in defending his controversial work, “The New Universal Philosophy” (Nova de universis philosophia), from the theological criticisms that had led it to be condemned by the Congregation of the Index shortly after it appeared in print in 1591. Upon his death, his chair in Platonic philosophy was awarded to the other major university teacher of Platonism in Italy at the time, Patrizi's contemporary and correspondent, Jacopo Mazzoni (Kristeller 1964, 113-116; Muccillo 1992).