Campanella wrote his utopia from a Naples prison and later guarded a pope from eclipses
Tommaso Campanella spent 27 years in Neapolitan fortresses after a failed plot against Spanish rule, escaping execution by feigning madness. In prison he wrote The City of the Sun, a vision of a shared, egalitarian society. Released, he became astrological adviser to Pope Urban VIII, performing rituals to shield him from predicted eclipses.
Born in 1568 to an illiterate cobbler in Calabria, Campanella was a prodigy who joined the Dominicans before turning fourteen, taking the name Tommaso after Thomas Aquinas. He soon rejected the reigning authority of Aristotle in favour of Bernardino Telesio, who held that knowledge comes through the senses and that everything in nature can feel. His first book, in 1592, defended Telesio. In Naples he took up astrology, which ran through all his later writing.
Such views brought him before the Roman Inquisition in 1594 and kept him confined in a convent until 1597. Back in Calabria, he was accused of leading a conspiracy in Stilo aimed at a society holding goods in common, spurred by prophecies and his own reading of the stars that a new spiritual age would dawn in 1600. Betrayed by fellow plotters and captured in 1599, he confessed under interrogation, then set his cell alight and acted insane to avoid death. He received a life sentence instead.
Prison did not silence him. Besides The City of the Sun, drafted in Italian in 1602 and later printed in Latin, he produced works on metaphysics, theology and politics, and kept up correspondence with scholars across Europe. In 1616 he wrote a defence of Galileo, published in 1622, and in 1632 he warned Galileo that theologians who knew no mathematics were preparing to ban his Dialogue.
Urban VIII secured his release in 1626 and, fearing prophecies that eclipses in 1628 and 1630 foretold his death, used Campanella's natural magic to ward them off. The pope survived and let him open a school in Rome. When a new Calabrian conspiracy by one of his followers erupted in 1634, Campanella fled to France, where Cardinal Richelieu protected him and Louis XIII paid him a pension. He died in Paris in 1639.
Source: Tommaso Campanella
