In comparison with More’s Utopia, Campanella’s description of a perfect society known in English as The City of the Sun appears to be both one step back and one step forward. Campanella’s utopia manifests regression in that it has a millenarian inspiration and shows the realization of biblical prophecies in a theocratic society. Thomas More, however, in his Utopia – though not as lord chancellor – argued for toleration of different beliefs and, in principle, expounded the idea of a separation of church and state. On the other hand, Campanella is more modern than More in his firm defense of unrestrained scientific investigation. He shares this scientific orientation with his slightly older contemporary Francis Bacon, but there is no indication that he knew Bacon’s publications, nor that Bacon had more than superficial knowledge of Campanella’s work.

The discovery of the sciences: Campanella and Bacon

Born into a poor family in Stilo, Calabria, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) became a Dominican monk when he was fourteen years old. He hoped to receive a solid education in this way and indeed was soon considered one of the most learned scholars of Italy. But he did not have much luck in his career. His independent interpretation of the patristic tradition and the Bible brought him into conflict with the Inquisition, while at the same time he was persecuted for his participation in an unsuccessful rebellion against the Spanish domination of southern Italy. In 1599 he was arrested by the Spanish authorities. He could escape execution by pretending insanity but remained in various prisons for most of the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he wrote a voluminous oeuvre on a wide range of subjects – on poetics and metaphysics, theology and medicine, the empirical sciences and astrology – both in Italian and Latin. Some of these works have been lost; others were smuggled out of prison and published.

Before his arrest he stayed briefly in northern Italy, in Bologna and Florence, and in Padua, where he enrolled at the university and in 1593 met Galileo, four years his senior. His admiration for and loyal friendship with Galileo appears from his Defense of Galileo (Apologia pro Galileo), written in jail in 1616 and published in Germany in 1622.