Italian humanist poet; b. Naples, 1455; d. Naples, 1530. Sannazaro was the center of Pontano's Academy, and was famous throughout Europe for the Arcadia, an autobiographical allegory in the form of a pastoral romance about lost love. Its freshness belies the conventional theme and vitalizes the idyllic setting; it also contributed to the development of the vernacular as a literary language. Sannazaro also composed Latin elegies, epigrams, and eclogues.[NCE]