In 1453, nine years after Leonardo Bruni's death, Poggio Bracciolini, his friend and fellow-student of Salutati, succeeded him as chancellor of the Florentine Republic. Poggio, by then seventy-three years old, had, like Bruni, received his early intellectual formation in the circle of humanists around Salutati, and, again like Bruni, had as a young man left Florence for a career in the Papal Curia. Poggio was to remain with the Curia for the greater part of his life, never, however, cutting himself off from his Florentine friends, or, for that matter, from Florentine life generally.

In 1453, at a critical moment in the war then raging between Florence and Milan on the one hand, and Venice and Naples on the other, Poggio accepted the Signoria's offer of the chancellorship and, in a context not unlike that pertaining during the tenures of Salutati and Bruni in the period of the earlier Visconti wars, returned amidst popular acclaim to the city of his youth.

There is, then, a kind of symmetry in the lives of Salutati, Bruni and Poggio. Poggio, although born at Lanciola, near Terranuova, was brought up in Arezzo, the town of Bruni's birth, and, like Bruni, was sent to the Florentine Studio to study notarial law.