[1] The Academy had grown out of meetings held by him and his young companions in his house in the Via dell'Oriuolo, during and immediately after the plague of 1630-1, for the purpose of mutual assistance and encouragement in their studies.
[5] These scholarly meetings had succeeded so well, and had been found to supply certain peculiar wants so much better than the two older Florentine academies, and than others already existing, that, about 1633, they had taken development into a society of virtuosi, which again had divided itself into a so-called "University," for grave scientific studies, and a so-called "Academy," for the cultivation of Latin and Italian literature, both under the name of the Apatisti, and with a common or at least a connecting organization.
[6] By the year 1638, the Academy had been fully established, with its laws, its office-bearers, its patrons saints, its "protector" among the princes of the House of Medici, its device for its seal, and its motto from Dante.
[6] One of its rules (there was a similar custom in most of the Italian academies) was that every member should, in his academic connexions, be known not by his own name but by some anagram or pseudonym.
He had been made a member of the Accademia della Crusca in 1650; he had filled no fewer than four times, between 1659 and his death, the presidency or consulship of the Accademia Fiorentina; he had been made a member of the Academy of Arcadia under the name of Alcino Tipaniese; and he had published a series of compositions in prose and in verse, the titles of which make a considerable list.