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Benedetto Varchi (; 1502/15031565) was an Italian humanist, historian, and poet.
With his return to Florence, he fought in the defence of the temporarily revived Republic of Florence, during the siege by the Medici and imperialists in 1530, and was exiled after the surrender of the city; he spent time at Padua (1537), where he was a protégé of the émigré Piero Strozzi and at Bologna (1540). In 1536 he took part in Strozzi's unsuccessful expedition against Medicean rule, but seven years later Varchi was called back to Florence by Cosimo I, who gave him a pension and appointed him one of the three official historians of Florence along with Giovanni Battista Adriani and Scipione Ammirato. His Storia fiorentina (16 vol.) covers the period from 1527 to 1538, though it was so frank it was not published in Florence until 1721. Varchi also wrote a number of plays, poems, dialogues, and translations from the classics.
With his return to Medici patronage, he became a member of the Accademia fiorentina, occupied with studies of linguistics, literary criticism, esthetics, and philosophy, but also, as became a Renaissance humanist in botany and alchemy. His tract L'Hercolano, in the form of a dialogue between the writer and a conte Ercolano, discussed the Tuscan dialect as it was spoken at Florence, in the vulgar rather than in Latin, an innovation in works of linguistics; it was published posthumously, in 1570. Ercolano, dialogo nel qual si ragiona generalmente delle lingue e in particolare della fiorentina e della toscana, Giunti, Firenze 1570. He wrote a comedy La Suocera ("The Mother-in-Law").
Towards the end of his life, he had a spiritual crisis and took holy orders.
In Ezra Pound's The Cantos, Varchi is mentioned with approbation (Canto V) for his honesty as a historian who did not try to fill in gaps in a historical record just to make that record neat. Rather, he was willing to admit that he did not know or that the motives or the events surrounding a particular incident could not be absolutely determined. Pound gives as an example of Varchi's honesty his investigation—for his history of Florence—of the murder of Alessandro de' Medici. Varchi admitted that after all his attempts to uncover the facts he could not decide on the motives of Alessandro's murderer (Lorenzino de' Medici, Alessandro's cousin).
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