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An Italian lyric poet (1552-1637); born at Savona. Impatient of dependence on the great, he again and again abandoned the courts of noble patrons, and at last settled down in his native Savona. Pindar and Anacreon were his delights among the poets, and his countrymen named him "the Italian Pindar". But his Pindaric odes have little of the grace and force of Pindar; the poet labours too patently for effect in strophe and antistrophe, in bold inversions and composite epithets; he is not spontaneous; he is dull. Yet some of his little songs after Anacreon are models of elegance and grace. His epic and dramatic poems hardly rise above mediocrity. He wrote a charming autobiographical sketch, which shows him to have been ever an honorable man, good lover, good hater, and sincere Christian.