[1] A teacher in Humanities, university professor and preceptor to the nobility, he had a lively and colourful career, moving frequently between states to avoid denunciation and imprisonment: he was successively at Turin, Milan, Pavia, Venice and Lucca, before becoming a religious exile in Switzerland, first at Lausanne and finally at Basel, where he settled.

Celio Secondo was born on 1 May 1503 at Cirié, in Piedmont, not far from Turin, to Jacomino Troterio Curione and Charlotte de Montrotier (a lady in the court of Bianca of Savoy) who died giving birth to him.

He was brought up by his maternal aunt Maddalena at Moncalieri (in the Po valley under the Western Alps), a little town under the authority of Turin, where his father received public appointments and where his mother's family dwelt.

[5] Curio planned a journey into Germany, but instead found himself imprisoned for two months in the fortress of Caprano by order of the Bishop of Ivrea, Cardinal Bonifacio Ferrero.

[9] His brethren having died of the plague Curio should have returned to Moncalieri to settle his inheritance with his only surviving sister, but, faced with being denounced for heresy, he renounced his rights.

Having failed to respond to a summons to Casale from Federico Gonzaga, successor to the Marquessate, he took work as a teacher at Castiglione Torinese, where in a disputation with a Dominican preacher in 1535 he argued in defence of Luther.

In 1536 he obtained a chair in humanistic letters for three years at the University of Pavia: Andrea Alciati was his colleague there, and he wrote his first Orations and the first draft of the three books of Schola, sive De Perfecto Grammatico (not published until 1555).

He described the perfect Grammaticus as an orator who takes the classical foundations of Cicero and Quintilian to inform a contemporary embodiment of the humanist professor, one who dignifies his profession through full responsibility towards his role as educator and cultural guide.

To him he dedicated the Aranei Encomion, a short tract treating the fable of Arachne as an allegory of the Church and Holy Wisdom, published in Venice in 1540.

The Gonfaloniere, Francesco Burlamacchi [it], hoped to end the dominion of Cosimo I de' Medici and the temporal power of the Church in that region, and to create a federation of free Tuscan cities.

When Curio arrived, there was already a large active colony of Italian internal religious exiles, including Paolo Lazise, Celso Martinengo, the Jewish convert Emanuele Tremellio, Peter Martyr and Girolamo Zanchi.

At the end of July Peter Martyr, the young disciple Giulio Terenziano, Lazise and Tremellius fled, while Curio took refuge at first in Pisa, where the Inquisition tried to catch up with him.

Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, on 26 August 1542, sent to Duke Cosimo from Rome the warrant for the arrest for that "wretched spirit called Celio of Turin", who however had already taken the road to Switzerland and was received, at the recommendation of the theologian Heinrich Bullinger, in the Academy of Lausanne.

He had crossed the frontier in Valtellina in company with another heretic, the antitrinitarian Camillo Renato, whom he described to Bullinger as "very outstanding in letters and religion" and "good and learned among the best".

In 1544 his plainly anticlerical and antipapistical dialogue Pasquillus Extaticus et Marphorius made its first appearance in a collection of Pasquinades, Pasquillorum Tomi Duo, by various authors, which Curio introduced through the press of Giovanni Oporino at Basel.

Returning to Lausanne, where three more daughters were born to him, he maintained a diffident attitude towards the Calvinist theology prevalent there, but avoided open polemic or dissention.

He maintained contact with other religious exiles, including Sebastian Castellio (who had left Geneva in 1544 having fallen out with Calvin), and with the Italian Lelio Sozzini.

When Ochino travelled into exile in England in that year he was carrying books and letters of introduction from Curio to Sir John Cheke, preceptor to King Edward VI.

[24] When Castellio in 1554 strongly attacked the conviction of Michael Servetus in a published writing, Curio was suspected of being his co-author by John Calvin and Theodore Beza.

In 1554 Sir John Cheke met him in Strasbourg, soon after leaving England in voluntary exile following the accession of Queen Mary, by whom the English reforms were reversed.

His editions and commentaries on classical works range from his Thesaurus Linguae Latinae to the Aristotelis Stagiritae Tripartitae Philosophiae Opera Omnia, from the Commentarii a Cicerone, Tacito, Plauto, Sallustio ed Emilio Probo, to the Quattro Libri dei Logices Elementorum of Aristotle.

[35] Particularly notable from his last years was his Latin translation of the History of Francesco Guicciardini, dedicated to Charles IX of France and printed by Pietro Perna in 1566, which placed an essential work of Italian historiography at the disposal of students throughout Europe.