During a three years' residence in Mantua where Vittorino held the celebrated humanistic school "La Giocosa", he rapidly acquired a competent knowledge of Latin under his teaching, supporting himself meanwhile by giving lessons in Greek, and by copying manuscripts of the ancient classics.

[citation needed] In 1447 he became professor of Greek in the newly founded University of Ferrara, to which students in great numbers from all parts of Italy were soon attracted by his fame as a teacher.

[11] Amongst his students were fellow Byzantine Greeks Demetrius Chalcondyles, a leading scholar of the Renaissance period and Andronicus Callistus, a cousin of Theodore Gaza's.

After the death of Nicholas (1455), being unable to make a living at Rome, Gaza removed to Naples, where he enjoyed the patronage of Alphonso the Magnanimous for two years (1456–1458).

Shortly afterwards he was appointed by Cardinal Bessarion to a benefice in Calabria, where the later years of his life were spent, and where he died about 1475 and was buried in the Basilian monastery of San Giovanni a Piro.

His translations into Latin were very numerous, including: He also turned into Greek Cicero's De senectute and Somnium Scipionis with much success, in the opinion of Erasmus; with more elegance than exactitude, according to the colder judgment of modern scholars.