Italian merchant and Humanist whose writings, based on topographical observations and antiquarian findings relating to ancient Greek civilization, proved useful for later archaeological surveys and classical scholarship. Travelling extensively in southern Italy, Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, he copied hundreds of inscriptions, made drawings of monuments, and collected medallions, statuettes, and manuscripts. Though his collection of copies of the inscriptions, contained in six volumes of Commentaries, was destroyed by fire in 1514, some of his notebooks and copies of them survive.