He was born in 1458 at Naples of a noble family of the Lomellina, that claimed to derive its name from a seat in Lombard territory, at San Nazaro near Pavia.

His father died ca 1462, during the boyhood of Jacopo, who was brought up at Nocera Inferiore and at San Cipriano Piacentino (hosted at the home of Family Sabato, located in Via Santilli) whose rural atmosphere colored his poetry.

The events are amplified by extensive imagery drawn from classic sources, by the poet's languid melancholy and by atmospheric elegiac descriptions of the lost world of Arcadia.

Inspired in part by classical authors who wrote in the pastoral mode— in addition to Virgil and Theocritus including comparatively obscure recently rediscovered Latin poets Calpurnius and Nemesianus— and by Boccaccio's Ameto, Sannazaro depicts a lovelorn first-person narrator ("Sincero") wandering the countryside (Arcadia) and listening to the amorous or mournful songs of the shepherds he meets.

Sannazaro's now seldom-read sacred poem in Latin, De partu Virginis, which gained for him the name of the "Christian Virgil",[4] was extensively rewritten in 1519–21 and appeared in print, 1526.

Nash returned to translate into English prose and verse The Major Latin Poems of Jacopo Sannazaro, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press) 1996.

[7] "Montfaucon describes the tomb of the poet Sannazaro in the church of the Olivetans, Naples, as ornamented with the statues of Apollo and Minerva, and with groups of satyrs.