He also attempted the concision of Tacitus in his own Italian prose, taking a motto Strictius Arctius reflecting his ambition.

By devoting himself to trade, first in Lyon and later at home, he made a large fortune which permitted him to dedicate much of his industrious life to historical research and literature.

In order to refute the charge of prolixity advanced against the Italians by the French scholar Henri Estienne, he undertook a translation of Tacitus' writings in which he succeeded in being more concise than the Latin original.

[4] The Academicians Della Crusca have sanctioned the high merit of this work, by rejecting every other translation of Tacitus, and by quoting very often that of Davanzati in their Vocabolario.

[5] In 1582 Davanzati completed his translation of the preface to the Hero's Pneumatica, which under the title Della natura del voto he dedicated to the architect and painter Bernardo Buontalenti.

[7] His Scisma d'Inghilterra [The Anglican Schism], an account of contemporary English history first published in Rome in 1602.

Davanzati begins his Lezione delle monete by showing how “barter is a necessary complement of division of labour amongst men and amongst nations”; he then passes on to show how there is easily a “want of coincidence in barter,” which calls for a “medium of exchange”; and this must be capable of “subdivision,” and be a “store of value.” He then goes off upon a historical digression on currencies, and on returning from thence recognises in money “a common measure of value.” This leads him to a dissertation on the causes of value in general, in which respect his remarks are also worth mentioning, because he has clearly shown that utility and value are “accidents of things” and functions of the “quantity in which they exist.” Proceeding to examples, he remarks “that one single egg was more worth to Count Ugolino in his tower than all the gold of the world,” but that, on the other hand, “ten thousand grains of corn are only worth one of gold in the market,” and that “water, however necessary for life, is worth nothing, because superabundant.” In the siege of Casilinum “a rat was sold for 200 florins, and the price could not be called exaggerated, because next day the man who sold it was starved and the man who bought it was still alive.” Returning to his argument, he says all the money in a country is worth all the goods, because the one exchanges for the other and nobody wants money for its own sake.