ABSTRACT
Poggio Bracciolini’s emigration was, from an individual point of view, the starting point of a social and intellectual ascent, which led a young and penniless notary to become a figurehead of the pontifical administration and humanist culture in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. Poggio’s case illustrates, in an emblematic way, how much the early fifteenth-century Roman curia was a beating heart for the nascent humanist movement, both as a melting pot and as a European springboard. The papal curia at the end of the Western Schism was a melting pot for the humanist movement, not only in terms of relations between Rome and Florence, but at least for all of north-central Italy. In his always stimulating The Florentine Enlightenment 1400–1450, the historian George Holmes vigorously emphasized the decisive role of a “Florentine-curial axis” in the rise of the humanist movement at the turn of the fifteenth century.
