oving
protection.

Bartolommeo showed beautiful invention in masquerades, and was a rare
master in making scenic settings for comedies. He delighted to write
sonnets and other compositions in verse and prose, and in none was he
better than in the ottava rima, in which manner of writing he was an
author of passing good renown. He died at the age of forty, in the
year 1558.

Giovan Battista Bellucci of San Marino having been the son-in-law of
Girolamo Genga, I have judged that it would not be well to withhold
what I have to say of him, after the Lives of Girolamo and Bartolommeo
Genga, and particularly in order to show that men of fine intellect,
if only they be willing, succeed in everything, even if they set
themselves late in life to difficult and honourable enterprises; for
study, when added to natural inclination, has often been seen to
accomplish marvellous things. Giovan Battista, then, was born in San
Marino on the 27th of September, 1506, to Bartolommeo Bellucci, a
person of passing good family in that place; and after he had learned
the first rudiments of the humanities, when eighteen years of age, he
was sent by that same Bartolommeo, his father, to Bologna, to attend
to the pursuit of commerce under Bastiano di Ronco, a merchant of the
Guild of Wool. Having been there about two years, he returned to San
Marino sick of a quartan fever, which hung upon him two years; of
which being finally cured, he set up a wool business of his own, with
which he continued up to the year 1535, at which time his father,
perceiving that Giovan Battista was in good circumstances, gave him
for a wife in Cagli a daughter of Guido Peruzzi, a person of
considerable standing in that city. But she died not long afterwards,
and Giovan Battista went to Rome to seek out Domenico Peruzzi, his
brother-in-law, who was equerry to Signor Ascanio Colonna; and by
means of him Giovan Battista lived for two years with that lord as a
gentleman. He then returned home; and it came about that, as he
frequented Pesaro, Girolamo Genga, having come to know him as an
excellent and well-behaved young man, gave him a daughter of his own
for wife and took him into his house. Whereupon Giovan Battista, being
much inclined to architecture, and giving his attention with much
diligence to the architectural works that his wife's father was
executing, began to gain a very good grasp of the various manners of
building, and to study Vitruvius; and thus, what with