Gian Giorgio Trissino

He sided with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian whose army entered Vicenza in June 1509, accompanied by members of Vicentine nobility including the Thiene, Chiericati, and Porto families.

He had the advantages of a good humanistic training, studying Greek under Demetrios Chalkokondyles at Milan and philosophy under Niccolò Leoniceno at Ferrara.

In spite of the banishment from Vicenza pronounced upon him in 1509 because his family had favoured the plans of Maximilian, he was held in high esteem throughout Italy.

In his own composition, l'Italia liberata dai Goti (1547–1548), dealing with the campaigns of Belisarius in Italy, he sought to show that it was possible to write in the vernacular an epic in accordance with the classic precepts.

[4] In addition, Trissino played a prominent role in the early career of Andrea Palladio, which developed into a long and close friendship between the two men.

[citation needed] Heated discussions followed his 1524 essay titled Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua Italiana, in which he proposed to reform Italian orthography by adding the following letters to distinguish sounds of the spoken language: The idea was taken up for "j" and "u", which brought to the modern distinction V vs. U and I vs. J.

Other European languages eventually adopted these new letters and distinctions in their orthographies[citation needed], before it was largely abandoned in contemporary Italian, which generally spells the sound [j] with an I.