Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet, is regarded as one of the great satirists of the Renaissance period. He was born in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, in 1547. Little is known of his youth or education except that in 1568 Cervantes was a student of the humanist Juan Lopez de Hoyos, who edited an elegiac volume on the death of Queen Elizabeth of Valois, to which Cervantes contributed some verses. Possibly fleeing arrest, Cervantes went to Naples and then Rome in 1569; there in the service of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva, he studied Italian literature and philosophy, which were later to influence his work. ...