Cornaro

Cornaro, the name of a Venetian noble family, of which the most illustrious members were: (1) Caterina (1454-1510), married King James II. of Cyprus in 1472, after whose early death she was kept in mild imprisonment by the Venetians until 1489, when she set up a kind of court for poets and scholars at Assolo, near Bassano.—(2) Luigi, born 1467, an instructive example of temperance. Delicate by constitution, at forty he found his health so much impaired by his intemperance that an immediate change of life was absolutely necessary. He at once adopted strict rules of temperance both in meat and drink, by which means he prolonged a cheerful old age almost to a hundred years, dying in 1566. At eighty-three he published his famous Discorsi della Vita Sobia (Padua, 1558), which was translated into most European languages (Eng. 1779).