Giovanni Dondi dall'Orologio

[1] It is frequently reported, in sources from the 19th and early 20th centuries[2][3] to the present,[4][5] that the "Marquis Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio" was responsible for introducing the Padovana chicken, which closely resembles the Polish breed, from Poland to Italy.

[7] In the introduction, Dondi writes that his machine was built in accordance with the 13th-century Theorica planetarum of Campano di Novara, and to demonstrate the validity of the descriptions of the motion of heavenly bodies of Aristotle and Avicenna.

[1] The autograph manuscript was published in 1987 in a critical edition with colour facsimile and French translation by Poulle as the first volume of the Opera omnia of Jacopo and Giovanni Dondi.

[8] Of the twenty-nine lectures on medical topics, the Sermones and Colationes, delivered between 1356 and 1388, only the titles survive, with the exception of one, the Sermo in conventu magistri Iohannis ab Aquila in medicina 1367 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Lat.

[9] The twenty-four Quaestiones super libris Tegni, dating from about 1356, are preserved in a manuscript begun in 1370 by Tommaso da Crema and now in the Biblioteca Palatina of Parma (Parmense 1065); Tegne was the mediaeval name for the summary by Galenus of the works of Hippocrates.

Another lost work, a tractatulum Galieni occultam seriem explicantem in distinctione dispositionum corporum humanorum, quorum in libro Microtegni sub brevitate restrinxit reales differentias inter illas, preterquani in paucis assignatum, was probably written at Pavia during the plague of 1383, and may have discussed the De complexionibus of Galenus.

It contains his Iter Romanum, which describes the Roman monuments of Rimini and Rome in a scientific manner, with measurements and transcriptions of inscriptions, and was published by Rossi in 1888;[13] his Epistolario of twenty-eight letters, of which the two to Petrarch have attracted particular attention; and his Rime, consisting of forty-two sonnets, five madrigals and three ballate, published by Medin in 1895[14] and Daniele in 1990.

Dondi writes that he obtained the idea of an astrarium from the Theorica planetarum of Giovanni Campano da Novara, who describes the construction of the equatorium.

It provided a continuous display of the major elements of the solar system and of the legal, religious, and civil calendars of the day.