Francesco Albertini was a canon of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 and a chaplain of Cardinal Fazio Santoro in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

. In 1510 he wrote three books: The Opusculum de mirabilibus novae & veteris urbis Romae, the Septem mirabilia orbis et urbis Romae et Florentinae and the Memoriale di molte picture e statue sono nella inclyta cipta di Florentia.

Opusculum de mirabilibus novae & veteris urbis Romae was "the most popular guide to Ancient Rome in the sixteenth century". Albertini presented it as the new and updated Mirabilia

Mirabilia Urbis Romae

Mirabilia Urbis Romae is a much-copied medieval Latin text that served generations of pilgrims and tourists as a guide to the city of Rome. The original, which was written by a canon of St Peter's, dates from the 1140s...

"shorn of its fables and nonsense", and included a substantial desription of the reconstruction of Rome started by Pope Sixtus IV

Pope Sixtus IV

Pope Sixtus IV , born Francesco della Rovere, was Pope from 1471 to 1484. His accomplishments as Pope included the establishment of the Sistine Chapel; the group of artists that he brought together introduced the Early Renaissance into Rome with the first masterpiece of the city's new artistic age,...

.

Memoriale di molte picture e statue sono nella inclyta cipta di Florentia is generally considered the first guidebook

GUIdebook

GUIdebook is a website that contains screenshots of computer software.It shows a visual history of the software's user interface. It includes operating systems like Mac OS and Windows, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE, portable operating systems like Newton OS and Windows CE, and...

 of Florence. According to Klein and Zerner, it is "a superficial and rather poor piece of writing" of dubious factual value, but it stands out as a monument of artistic spirit, pride and self-consciousness of Florentine people. However, De Boer shows that Albertini made few attributional mistakes and the book, albeit concise, is one of the most valuable sources about Florentine art prior to Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...

's Lives of the Artists.

Sources

• Charles L. Stinger (1998). The Renaissance in Rome. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253334918.
• Robert Klein, Henri Zerner (1989). Italian art, 1500-1600: sources and documents, Volume 1500. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0810108526.
• Waldemar H. de Boer (2010). Memorial of Many Statues and Paintings in the Illustrious City of Florence by Francesco Albertini (1510), edited by Michael W. Kwakkelstein. Centro Di. ISBN 9788870384925.