The City of the Sun

by Tommaso Campanella

Overview

The City of the Sun is a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain," The book describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of Adocentyn in the Picatrix, an Arabic guide to magical town planning. In the final part of the work, Campanella prophesies - in the veiled language of astrology - that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633841109
Publisher:	Positronic Publishing
Publication date:	07/04/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	52
File size:	76 KB

About the Author

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was an Italian philosopher, poet, astrologer, and Dominican friar. Born Giovanni Domenico Campanella in Calabria, he was the son of a cobbler. At fourteen, he entered the Dominican Order and took the name Tommaso after Thomas Aquinas. His early studies in theology and philosophy led him to the empiricism of Bernardino Telesio, a prominent Italian scientist of the sixteenth century. By 1590, Campanella was studying astrology in Naples, where he gained a reputation for heterodoxy and faced persecution during the Roman Inquisition. Arrested in Padua in 1594, he spent several years in confinement at a Roman convent before earning his freedom and returning to his native Calabria. In 1599, he was imprisoned and tortured for his role in a conspiracy against Spanish rule in the town of Stilo. Campanella eventually confessed and was incarcerated in Naples for twenty-seven years, during which time he composed such works as The Monarchy in Spain (1600), Political Aphorisms (1601), and The City of the Sun (1602). This last title, originally written in Italian and later translated into Latin by the author, is considered an important example of utopian fiction in which Campanella describes the traditions and organization of an egalitarian society. Released from prison in 1626, he fled to France in 1634 when one of his followers was implicated in a new Calabrian conspiracy. His final years were spent in Paris, where he earned the support of King Louis XIII and was protected by Cardinal Richelieu.