Pietro Contarini (died 1495)

Pietro Contarini (died April 1495) was a Venetian patrician, administrator and humanist.

[1] His father having died, he was presented by his mother to the Avogadori di Comun on 27 November 1464 when he was eighteen.

[1] Contarini wrote a collection of elegies in Latin elegiac couplets, Ad Gelliam elegiarum libri tres.

In form, they are letters in praise of a girl named Gellia addressed to other patricians, including Benedetto Sanudo and Marcantonio Morosini.

[7][8] In practice, the elegies are probably a life's work based on his classical learning, especially of Tibullus, Catullus and Ovid.

He recorded in De his quae a Venetis tentata sunt how, when Doeg Marco Barbarigo died (14 August 1486), some Ottoman ambassadors requested permission to attend the funeral.