John Florio - Exile of The Family

Exile of The Family

Anthony à Wood says that the Florio family, which now included infant John Florio, left England on the accession of Queen Mary. In Strasburg, Florio met members of the aristocratic de Salis family of Bregaglia (Bergell), in the Alpine canton of the Grisons (in Italian-speaking Protestant Switzerland). Count de Salis offered Michelangelo the post of pastor at Soglio, which offered him the manse (now a restaurant) on the edge of a precipice, the post of local school teacher and a Reformed pulpit. Soglio was remote from the Inquisition and was situated near Chiavenna (north of Lake Como in Italy), a center of Reformed preaching. John Florio grew up speaking Italian with his father (and possibly fluent English with his mother). His father would have taught him French and German. When he was seven, was sent to live with and to be schooled in Tübingen in Germany by the Reformed Protestant theologian, Pier Paolo Vergerio, a native of Venetian Capodistria (who had also lived in Swiss Bregaglia) and later to attend university in Germany. John returned to England, possibly with his mother, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in the early 1570s, in possession of a formidable Christian Reformed and humanist education.