[1] In his Discorsi Ammirato presents himself as an anti-Machiavellian from the start, leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to confute the main theses of Il Principe.

On the contrary, his Discorsi present the works of the Roman historian as an antidote to Il Principe, and this approach was to prove widely popular during the long Tacitus revival.

[4] Ammirato attended literary clubs, striking up a friendship with the poet Berardino Rota, the historian Angelo di Costanzo and the polymath Bartolomeo Maranta.

He afterwards travelled about Italy in quest of occupation; he resided some time at Rome, Padua and Venice, where he became secretary to Alessandro Contarini, a Venetian patrician, and became acquainted with Sperone Speroni, Vittoria Colonna, and Pietro Aretino.

[5] He contributed the Argomenti dei canti to the edition of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso published in 1556 by Vincenzo Valgrisi, with the collaboration of Girolamo Ruscelli.

[5] In his native country Ammirato was temporarily employed by several noblemen, and was sent by the Archbishop of Naples on a mission to Pope Pius V. It was a flourishing period in the history of papal Rome.

He entered the patronage network of the reforming churchman Girolamo Seripando, to whom he dedicated the philosophical dialogue Il Dedalione o ver del poeta.

In 1569 he fixed his residence at Florence, where the Grand Duke Cosimo I offered him a position as state historiographer at the respectable salary of 300 scudi a year, and Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici gave him the use of his own country house at La Petraia.

[18] In 1612 French royal geographer and humanist Antoine de Laval recapitulated Ammirato's arguments in his Dessein des problèmes politiques.

[23] Ammirato, was highly critical of Machiavelli's Florentine Histories and accused the Florentine secretary of having «altered names, twisted facts, confounded cases, increased, added, subtracted, diminished and did anything that suited his fancy without checking, without lawful restraint and what is more, he seems to have done so occasionally on purpose.»[24] Ammirato left several manuscript works, among others a continuation of the Monte Cassino Chronicle, and his own autobiography, which is kept in the library of Santa Maria la Nuova of Florence.