Filippo Sassetti

1540 – 1588

Filippo Sassetti (1540–1588) was a traveller and merchant from a long-established Florentine mercantile family, who was born in Florence in 1540. Though his father had sold family interests and he had to commence as a clerk in a merchant business, Sassetti enrolled in 1568 at the University of Pisa and was imbued with a humanist education; he was proficient in botany, geography, astronomy and cosmography and was curious about philology and the classical languages.