text: Friends Poggio cultivated and maintained throughout his life close friendships with some of the most important learned men of the age: Niccolò de' Niccoli (the inventor of the italic script), Leonardo Bruni ("Leonardo Aretino"), Lorenzo and Cosimo de' Medici, Carlo Marsuppini ("Carlo Aretino"), Guarino Veronese, Ambrogio Traversari, Francesco Barbaro, Francesco Accolti, Feltrino Boiardo, Lionello d'Este (who became Marquis of Ferrara, 1441–1450), and many others, who all shared his passion for retrieving the manuscripts and art of the ancient Greco-Roman world. His early friendship with Tommaso da Sarzana stood Poggio in good stead when his learned friend was elected pope, under the name of Nicolas V (1447−1455), a proven protector of scholars and an active sponsor of learning, who founded the Vatican library in 1448 with 350 codices.
  These learned men were adept at maintaining an extended network of personal relations among a circle of talented and energetic scholars in which constant communication was secured by an immense traffic of epistolary exchanges.
  They were bent on creating a rebirth of intellectual life for Italy by means of a vital reconnection with the texts of antiquity. Their worldview was eminently characteristic of Italian humanism in the earlier Italian Renaissance, which eventually spread all over Western Europe and led to the full Renaissance and the Reformation, announcing the modern age.
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