Girolamo Ruscelli (1500s-1566) was an Italian cartographer, editor, humanist and polymath who primarily worked and lived in Venice during the early 16th century. Ruscelli founded an 'Academy of Secrets' in Naples in the 1540s, composed of humanists and noblemen; the academy was the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. His best known work is a significant and important revision to Ptolemy's Geographia, published posthumously in 1574.