[7][8][9][10][11][12] Fausto was born in Sebenico (Šibenik), Venetian Dalmatia into the Croatian family of count Michele/Mihovil Vrančić (Veranzio) and Katarina Berislavić.

While still a child, he moved to Venice, where he attended school, and then to Padua to join the University, where he focused on law, physics, engineering and mechanics.

At the court of King Rudolf II, at the Hradčany castle in Prague, Veranzio was the chancellor for Hungary and Transylvania, often in contact with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe.

Veranzio's masterwork, Machinae Novae (Venice 1615 or 1616),[17] contained 49 large pictures depicting 56 different machines, other devices, and technical concepts.

According to legend, Veranzio, in 1617, at over sixty-five years of age, implemented his parachute design and tested it by jumping from St Mark's Campanile in Venice.

Veranzio was the author of a five-language dictionary,[26] Dictionarium quinque nobilissimarum Europæ linguarum, Latinæ, Italicæ, Germanicæ, Dalmatiæ, & Vngaricæ,[27] published in Venice in 1595, with 5,000 entries for each language: Latin, Italian, German, the Dalmatian vernacular (in particular, the chakavian dialect of Croatian) and Hungarian.

[28] The Dictionarium is a very early and significant example of both Croatian and Hungarian lexicography, and contains, in addition to the parallel list of vocabulary, other documentation of these two languages.

Also, at the end of the book, Veranzio included Croatian language versions of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria and the Apostles' Creed.

[29] In an extension of the dictionary called Vocabula dalmatica quae Ungri sibi usurparunt, there is a list of Proto-Croatian words that entered the Hungarian language.

[28] Only a few of Veranzio's works related to history remain: Regulae cancellariae regni Hungariae and De Slavinis seu Sarmatis in Dalmatia exist in manuscript form, while Scriptores rerum hungaricum was published in 1798.

In Logica nova ("New logic") and Ethica christiana ("Christian ethics"), which were published in a single Venetian edition in 1616, Veranzio dealt with the problems of theology regarding the ideological clash between the Reformation movement and Catholicism.

When Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian-British philosopher and mathematician, moving from Berlin to England, began studying mechanical engineering in 1908, he was highly influenced by his reading of Renaissance technical treatises, particularly Veranzio's Machinae Novae.

In 2012, Faust Vrančić Memorial Centre Archived 2015-06-30 at the Wayback Machine was opened on the island of Prvić where visitors can learn more about Veranzio's life and see his most famous inventions.