His Roman friends
In Rome, between 1513 and 1514, Castiglione bound close ties and cultivated friendships with the protagonists of intellectual life that gravitated around the entourage of Leone X: Pietro Bembo, Iacopo Sadoleto, Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Tommaso Fedra Inghirami, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Antonio Tebaldeo, Federico Fregoso. He also frequented the literary circles with the most marked humanistic stamp, which were lead by personalities such as Blosio Palladio and Agostino Chigi, Angelo Colocci and Hans Goritz: here he deepened his studies and practice of writing in vulgar and, above all, in Latin, looking for rhetorical and stylistic models into which he could transfer considerations regarding morals and knowledge.
In 1516, following the fashion of the time, he completed a memorable expedition to the monumental ruins of Tivoli; he was accompanied by his friends Navagero, Beazzano, Raffaello and Bembo (who spoke of the expedition to Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena in a letter dated 3rd April). The group is the mirror of the people Castiglione frequented in the Roman scene, where poetry and painting, archaeology and erudition mixed together in fertile collaboration.
In this period he worked on the first draft of his literary work of art, Il libro del Cortegiano, which he finished at the end of 1515. The writing of this work followed Castiglione’s desire to meditate on his own parable as a man of arms and a diplomat, capable of winning honours, first during his years of Milanese training, then in Urbino and Rome, at the service of the Dukes Guidubaldo and Francesco Maria. He no longer felt the wound inflicted when he left his home in Mantua and was dominated by his enthusiastic adhesion to the world of the present. The work immediately attracted the attention of his contemporaries, as is demonstrated by a Latin poem by Guido Postumo Silvestri (Epicedium in matrem), printed as early as 1517, in which Baldassarre appears as the author of The Cortegiano, alongside Andrea Navagero and Marcantonio Flaminio.
