Queer Places:
Horti Sallustiani, Piazza Sallustio, 21, 00187 Roma RM
Chiesa di San Salvatore in Lauro
Rome, Città Metropolitana di Roma Capitale, Lazio, Italy
Julius Pomponius Laetus aka Giulio Pomponio-Leto (1428 – June 9, 1498) was
an Italian humanist. Pomponio-Leto (the humanistic pseudonym by which he was
known) was born in Diano, in Lucania, the illegitimate son of one Giovanni Sanseverino,
Prince of Salerno. He moved to Rome to study with the humanist Lorenzo Valla,
then taught there himself. Pomponio yearned to reconstruct classical Rome and,
around 1464, even set up in his own house the Roman Academy, which developed a
fanatical and quasi-religious cult of pagan antiquity.
Filippo Buonaccorsi and
Niccolo Lelio Cosmico, among other humanists, attended the institute. Pomponio
was admired by his contemporaries for his great erudition and in 1466 obtained
a position at the University of Rome. The next year, he left for Venice with
the intention of journeying further east to learn Greek and Arabic.
He stopped in Venice, teaching the two sons of Andrea Contarini and Luca
Michiel, two noblemen. However, a double catastrophe struck in 1468. First,
Pomponio was brought under investigation by Venice's Council of Ten on
suspicion of having seduced his students, whom he was said to have praised
with excessive ardour in some Latin poems (now lost). Pomponio's accusers in
the Council of Ten, according to Vladimiro Zabughin, referred ‘to a
‘dishonourable book’ which had been annotated in his hand, and to certain
indiscretions which he had let escape his lips’.
Meanwhile, in Rome, the pope alleged that Pomponio's academy, most
improbably, was organising a pagan and republican coup d’état. Pomponio and
Buonaccorsi figured among the principal suspects. The pope asked the Republic
of Venice to extradite Pomponio to Rome for trial. This was, paradoxically, to
save his life, since according to Gioacchino Paparelli, ‘In its hearing, the
Council of Ten decided that … Pomponio should be returned to the [Venetian]
Republic, if he were not sentenced to capital punishment, … there to be
punished for the crime of sodomy … which in Venice carried the death sentence.
… This judgement was not executed and Pomponio's extradition proved his
salvation’. He was incarcerated in the Castel Sant'Angelo until spring 1469,
but was then acquitted and freed. Pomponio wisely decided not to set foot in
Venice again and, for greater security, soon married.
While in prison, Pomponio had defended himself with a famous Latin
peroration (published by Isidoro Carini), in which he said that he had indeed
sung the praises of his students with love, but with the paternal and
‘Socratic’ love of a teacher. Zabughin comments perspicaciously: ‘From the
evidence in the court register of the Council of Ten, this was not an
effective defence but rather a digression.’
Once freed, Pomponio reopened his academy (which would survive his death)
and returned to his position at the University of Rome, teaching, among
others, Girolamo Balbi. Pomponio's
importance in cultural history lies mostly in his role as a teacher; his
publications are largely composed of lectures and commentaries on classical
works, and lack the philological rigour of the other great humanists of the
Renaissance. On his death he was buried in the church of San Salvatore in
Lauro in Rome. The existence in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice of two Latin
epigrams with sodomitical themes written by Pomponio (in Latin manuscript
4689) suggests that other writings of this sort may be rediscovered.
Angelo Colocci was the heir of Pomponio Leto’s house and Pomponio’s successor as leader
of the Roman Academy, which seems to have been less a regularized institution with
rules and a program than a state of mind compounded of conviviality, Roman patriotism, love of poetry, and (in the tradition of Pomponio) enthusiasm for the tangible remains of antiquity: statuary, ruins, coins, inscriptions, that were still found almost
daily in Renaissance Rome.
My published books:
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- Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon. Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian
History Vol.1: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century: From Antiquity
to the Mid-twentieth Century Vol 1 (p.352). Taylor and Francis. Edizione
del Kindle.
- The Roman ‘Academy’ of Pomponio Leto. From an informal Network to the Institution of a Literary Society
Susanna De Beer