"[2] Chiabrera was of patrician descent and born at Savona, a little town in the domain of the Genoese republic, 28 years after the birth of Pierre de Ronsard, with whom he has more in common than with the great Greek whose echo he sought to make himself.

A little while later he returned to Rome and entered the household of a cardinal, where he remained for several years, frequenting the society of Paulus Manutius and of Sperone Speroni, the dramatist and critic of Tasso, and attending the lectures and hearing the conversation of Muretus.

His reputation was made at once; but he seldom quit Savona, though often invited to do so, saving for journeys of pleasure, in which he greatly delighted, and for occasional visits to the courts of princes where he was often summoned for his verse's sake and in his capacity as a dramatist.

[1] A maker of odes in their elaborate pomp of strophe and antistrophe, a master of new, complex rhythms, a coiner of ambitious words and composite epithets, an employer of audacious transpositions and inversions, and the inventor of a new system of poetic diction, Chiabrera was compared with Ronsard.

The simple poet, with his adoration of Greek (when a thing pleased him greatly he was wont to talk of it as "Greek Verse"), delight in journeys and sightseeing, dislike of literary talk save with intimates and equals, vanities and vengeances, pride in remembered favours bestowed on him by popes and princes, infinita maraviglia over Virgil's versification and metaphor, fondness for masculine rhymes and blank verse, and quiet Christianity: all this may deserve more study than is likely to be spent on that "new world" of art which it was his glory to fancy his own, by discovery and by conquest.