Matteo Palmieri

He was educated in Florence and ran a profitable apothecary shop; like his father he pursued a career in civil service, becoming a well known and respected public official between 1432 and 1475 holding many posts and titles.

[1] At the end of his life, he commissioned from the Florentine painter Francesco Botticini (1446–1498) a monumental Assumption of the Virgin[3] for the church of the Benedictine nunnery of San Pier Maggiore in Florence, where the Palmieri had their chapel; in the painting are the kneeling donor portraits of Matteo and his wife Niccolosa de' Serragli.

In Italian Palmieri wrote a three-book poem La città di vita ("The City of Life") in 1465, which is an imitation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.

It is written as series of dialogs in four books, set in a country house in Mugello during the plague of 1430, with Agnolo Pandolfini, a rich Florentine merchant, as the main speaker.

Depending for the first dialogue upon Quintilian's Institutio oratoria and for the last three on Cicero's De officiis,[5] it discusses the physical and intellectual development of children, the moral life of a citizen, and the contrasting tensions between what is useful and what is honest.