No place having hitherto occurred suitable for mention of the Travels of Marco Polo, they, although belonging to the thirteenth century, may find mention here. From the purely literary point of view they are of no great importance, but as the first book that opened the knowledge of the East to Europeans, their significance cannot be overrated. Mention should also be made of another traveller, Ciriaco di Ancona, the first archæologist, who, in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, set the example of collecting inscriptions and works of antiquity.
The next prose author whom it is necessary to mention, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius the Second (1405–64), writing solely in Latin, has no place in the literary history of the Italian language, but is perhaps the most typical example of fhe fifteenth-century man of letters, accomplished, versatile, adroit, imperfectly restrained by principle, but inspired by a genuine zeal for culture and humanity. No literary personage since Petrarch had displayed such various activity, or, by his controversial, no less than by his diplomatic ability, had exerted an equal influence in the affairs of Church and State. Apart from the substantial merits of his writings, Æneas is a typical figure as indicating that the pen was beginning to govern the world, and that literary dexterity could make a Pope of a struggling adventurer. As an author he has come down to our day by his Commentaries of his own times, one of that valuable class of histories whose authors can say, "Pars magna fui"; and by his Euryalus and Lucretia, a romance founded on an actual occurrence, and noteworthy as a precursor of the modern novel.
In Leone Battista Alberti (1404–72) we at length
