Michelangelo Florio (1515–1566), possibly born in Florence, dead in Soglio, was the son of a Franciscan friar, before converting to Protestantism.
The spread of Lutheranism began to influence his thinking, and from the 1540s onwards he expressed his newly acquired beliefs while preaching from the church's pulpits.
[3] Searching for a safe refuge, he finally left his native Italy and settled in France, travelling through Lyon.
On 1 November 1550, he arrived in the City of London, which at that time contained many communities of Protestant refugees, who had fled from persecution by Catholics, and who had established Reformed churches, each catering to its own linguistic group, under the general superintendence of Jan Laski.
Thanks perhaps to the good credentials given to him by theologians like Bernardino Ochino and Pietro Martire Vermigli, Florio won favour with both the Church of England bishop Thomas Cranmer and also with the influential Secretary of State, William Cecil, who obtained for him the position of pastor of the Reformed church for Italian speakers.
Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII raised an army and marched down to London and overthrew Jane and was proclaimed queen.
Florio never forgot his young student, and dedicated to her memory his History of the life and death of the illustrious Jane Grey.
[5] With his wife and son, Florio settled in Strasbourg, where he got to know Federico of Salis, scion of a powerful family of the Val Bregaglia.
He offered Florio a post as pastor of Soglio in Switzerland, which had opened up after the recent death of Michele Lattanzio, another Italian refugee.
[7] However most of the controversies in which he was involved were with other Protestants in his Swiss canton, many of whom were refugees from Italy, who carried over from their homeland a certain impatience for ecclesiastical discipline and rituals, together with a request that theology be less dogmatic and more open to the needs both of the spirit and of reason.