  Ficino was born on 19 October, 1433, in Figline Valdarno, a small community southeast of Florence, to his mother Alexandra (the daughter of a Florentine citizen) and her husband, Dietifeci Ficino. Dietifeci, a physician, eventually served early fifteenth-century Florence’s greatest patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, who by the time of Ficino’s birth was one of the richest men in Europe. The precise course of Ficino’s education is uncertain, but it is plausible that from a young age he was exposed to the medical traditions shared by his father (folk elements, no doubt, had their part in these traditions, even if those elements are not often recorded). Two educators, Comando Comandi and Luca di San Gimignano, carried out Ficino’s early exposure to “grammatica,” which is to say basic Latinate education. The outlines of Ficino’s early career begin to appear a bit more clearly in the 1450s; and while it is still unclear with whom, exactly, he studied Greek and other matters, the names of the likely candidates, Francesco da Castiglione (who may have taught him Greek), Antonio degli Agli, Lorenzo Pisano, and Niccolò Tignosi, all point in a similar direction: that of an excellent but traditional education, focused on questions drawn from the realm of scholastic theology (Field 1988; Hankins 1989 and 2003–4; Vasoli 1997a).