INTRODUCTION

THE author of The City of the Sun Original Latin title: Civitas Solis; a famous early 17th-century work describing an ideal utopian society based on reason and communal property. was born in Stilo, Calabria, September 5, 1568. He became a student, a Dominican A member of the Order of Preachers, a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic., and a philosopher, and at the age of twenty-three published a work entitled Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses Original Latin: Philosophia sensibus demonstrata., which roused the ire of the schoolmen schoolmen: traditional scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance who focused on logic and the authority of established texts, who were blindly following the Aristotelian philosophy. In 1599 he was accused of heresy and of conspiracy against the Spanish Government, and was imprisoned in Naples, where he remained twenty-seven years. While he was an Italian patriot, and did set forth the new philosophy that is commonly associated with Bacon Referring to Francis Bacon, the English philosopher credited with developing the scientific method., he was condemned for books that he did not write and theories that he did not advocate. He was cross-questioned and tortured several times, and was finally released at the instance of Pope Urban VIII. He lived a few years in Rome, and then, when renewed persecution was threatened, fled to Paris, where Richelieu Cardinal Richelieu, the powerful chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. befriended him. The Sorbonne The famous theological faculty of the University of Paris. pronounced his works orthodox, and the King pensioned him. He died in a convent in Paris, May 21, 1639. The City of the Sun is one of the works that he wrote in prison. There is a biography of him by Baldacchini, and a later one by Amabile.