Pietro da Ripalta

Pietro da Ripalta, who lived from 1335 or 1340 to 1375, was an Italian notary and historian born at Piacenza. He entered the notarial profession, first recorded in private practice alongside Pietro Valla in 1357, and died of plague in 1375. He wrote a Chronica Placentina, a chronicle of Piacenza covering the city's history from its legendary origins to 1370, nesting it within a wider history of Lombardy, northern Italy and the world; for the earlier history he drew on sources including Paulus Orosius, Bede, Paul the Deacon and the notary-historian Giovanni Codagnello, and for more recent events he relied on eyewitnesses and oral tradition. The chronicle survives in fifteen manuscripts from the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries and was used by several later Piacentine chroniclers.