Georg Anton Lorenz Diefenbach was a German philologist and lexicographer, as well as a novelist associated with the German Nationalist movement. By career he was a pastor, like his father, and a librarian.
Lorenz Oken was a German naturalist, botanist, biologist, and ornithologist.
Oken was born Lorenz Okenfuss in Bohlsbach, Ortenau, Baden, and studied natural history and medicine at the universities of Freiburg and Würzburg. He went on to the University of Göttingen, where he became a Privatdozent, and shortened his name to Oken. As Lorenz Oken, he published a small work entitled Grundriss der Naturphilosophie, der Theorie der Sinne, mit der darauf gegründeten Classification der Thiere (1802). This was the first of a series of works which established him as a leader of the movement of "Naturphilosophie" in Germany.
Lorenzo Carcaterra is an American writer of Italian descent. Hell’s Kitchen is the setting for his most famous book, Sleepers, which was adapted as a 1996 film of the same name. In April 2009, he joined True/Slant as a blogger. True/Slant ceased operations on July 31, 2010, after only being open for a little less than a year total.
Lorenzo Da Ponte was a Venetian, later American, opera librettist, poet and Roman Catholic priest. He wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's most celebrated operas: The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790). He was the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, and with Manuel Garcia, the first to introduce Italian opera to America. Da Ponte was also a close friend of Mozart and Casanova.
Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, was an Italian statesman, banker, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, and the most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. He was a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. He held the balance of power within the Italic League, an alliance of states that stabilized political conditions on the Italian peninsula for decades, and his life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the Golden Age of Florence. On the foreign policy front, Lorenzo manifested a clear plan to stem the territorial ambitions of Pope Sixtus IV, in the name of the balance of the Italian League of 1454. For these reasons, Lorenzo was the subject of the Pazzi conspiracy (1478), in which his brother Giuliano was assassinated. The Peace of Lodi of 1454 that he supported among the various Italian states collapsed with his death. He is buried in the Medici Chapel in Florence.
