PALEARIO, Aonio (c. 1500-1570), Italian humanist and Reformer, was born about 1500 at Veroli in the Roman Campagna. Other forms of his name are Antonio Della Paglia, A. Degli Pagliaricci. In 1520 he went to Rome, where, during the years immediately following, he made lasting friendships among the scholars and men of letters whom Leo X. had gathered to his brilliant court. Driven from Rome by the troubles of 1527, he found a home first at Perugia and afterwards, from 1530 onwards, at Siena, where he married happily in 1534. In 1536 his didactic poem in Latin hexameters, De Immortalitate Animarum, was published at Lyons. It is divided into three books, the first containing his proofs of the divine existence, and the remaining two the theological and philosophical arguments for immortality based on that postulate. The whole concludes with a rhetorical description of the occurrences of the second advent. Meanwhile his religious views had been undergoing considerable modification, and in 1542 an Italian tract written by him and entitled Della Pienezza, Sufiicienza, et Satisfazione della Passione di Christo, or Libellus de Morte Christi, was made by the Inquisition the basis of a charge of heresy, from which, however, he successfully defended himself. To the period of his stay in Siena belongs also his Actio in Pontifices Romanos et eorum Asseclas, a vigorous indictment, in twenty “testimonia,” against what he now believed to be the fundamental error of the Roman Church in subordinating Scripture to tradition, as well as against various particular doctrines, such as that of purgatory; it was not, however, printed until after his death (Leipsic, 1606). In 1546 he accepted a professorial chair at Lucca, which he exchanged in 1555 for that of Greek and Latin literature at ...