Pietro Summonte was an Italian Renaissance humanist of Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

, a member of the learned circle of friends in the Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...

nian manner that constituted Pontano

Jovianus Pontanus

Iovianus Pontanus was an Italian humanist and poet.-Biography:Pontanus was born at Cerreto in the Duchy of Spoleto, where his father was murdered in one of the frequent civil brawls which then disturbed the peace of Italian towns.His mother escaped with the boy to Perugia, and it was here that...

's Accademia Pontaniana. Summonte's care in preserving his correspondence on artistic matters with the Venetian Marcantonio Michiel

Marcantonio Michiel

Marcantonio Michiel was a Venetian noble from a family prominent in the service of the State who was interested himself in matters of art...

 resulted in a precious archive mined by art historians. His major poem was the Canzone intitulata Aragonia. To him Jacopo Sannazaro

Jacopo Sannazaro

Jacopo Sannazaro was an Italian poet, humanist and epigrammist from Naples.He wrote easily in Latin, in Italian and in Neapolitan, but is best remembered for his humanist classic Arcadia, a masterwork that illustrated the possibilities of poetical prose in Italian, and instituted the theme of...

 and Benedetto Cariteo addressed verses, in Latin and the vernacular, and Sannazaro entrusted his Arcadia, which had circulated in manuscript since about 1485, but of which corrupt pirated editions appeared at Venice (1502) for a carefully corrected printing by Sigismondo Mayr (1504), in which Brian Richardson has detected revisions that brought the language closer to Boccaccio and Petrarch

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...

, so that it lost many of its southern dialect forms. Summonte, who took on the guidance of the Accademia Pontaniana after Pontano's death (1503), edited for publication Pontano's two books of Hendecasyllables, to which he applied the subtitle Baiae.