With the assistance of his ancestor, Professor of Italian Language and Literature Marcello Simonetta cracked an ancient code and solved an over-500 year old mystery.

While completing research on the legendary Medici family of Florence, who funded much of the city’s cultural progress, Simonetta gained access to the prestigious Ubaldini archive in Urbino, Italy and discovered an encoded document revealing secrets about an unsolved Medici mystery.

On April 26, 1478, Easter Day, while sitting at high mass in a cathedral in Florence, brothers Lorenzo and Guiliano were attacked by a group of assassins. The attempted coup successfully murdered Guiliano, stabbing him 19 times, but failed to kill Lorenzo, who was able to barricade himself in the rear of the cathedral safely behind sacristy doors.

The Medici family continued their reign and many believed the attempted assassination to have been orchestrated by rival families.

The letter Simonetta found was dated two months prior to the attack, but was written in code. Simonetta, however, had a secret of his own.

Earlier in his research, Simonetta had discovered a document of his ancestor, Cicco Simonetta, chancellor and regent of the Sforza in Milan during the Medici rule. The document detailed how to decipher messages in code.

After a month of toil, the Ubaldini letter implicated the notable Federico da Montefeltros, or the Duke of Urbino as he is commonly titled as a conspirator in the attack.

“He has always been considered the ultimate humanist condottiero [mercenary leader],” Simonetta told The Learning Channel in an interview. “Now we know he was involved personally in the conspiracy, inspired by Pope Sixtus IV and King Ferrante of Naples.”

The Pazzi Conspiracy, the historical name for the incident, was once thought to have been designed by the Pazzi family, a prominent family in Florence seeking to assume power, in conjunction with the Pope Sixtus IV. However, Professor Simonetta revealed that Montefeltro had contributed 600 troops to support the attack and secure the city of Florence. The troops were chased away when the coup failed.

“Vincent Ilardi, a Renaissance history professor who had Simonetta as a student at Yale, compared the discovery to someone 500 years from now finding a letter by Lee Harvey Oswald that implicated others in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, ”The Hartford Courant reported.

Simonetta said he is thrilled with the publicity the find has given to the Renaissance and Italian history. Montefeltro’s involvement in the coup speaks to the intense political environment prevalent in Renaissance Italy, he said. It is now known that Montefeltro covertly applied Machiavellian tactics frequently used in the Rennaissance period.

Simonetta has been contacted with many news corporations and he conducted interviews with The Learning Channel, The Hartford Courant, USItalia Website and The New York Times.

“When the papers found out about this everything went crazy,” Simonetta said. “I’ve taught this stuff in my classes. When the news hit Bologna, I received an e-mail from a student of mine who said that he had used my article in his class and when he saw it he said ‘That’s my professor.’”

Professor Simonetta published a book this year titled, “The Secret Renaissance: The World of the Secretary from Petrarch to Machiavelli.” The Pazzi Conspiracy is only a small section of the book, as Simonetta addresses broader themes of 15th century Italy. In the future, he plans on writing something less academic on the Pazzi Conspiracy and others that would read like a detective novel.

“Something more accessible and fun,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that my academic work isn’t fun but I was thinking of something like the ‘De Montefeltro Code.’”