 Tommaso Campanella was born in Stilo, a town in Calabria, one of the southern regions of Italy, on September 5, 1568. At the age of 14 he entered the Dominican Order. In 1588, while in Cosenza, another Calabrian town, he read the treatise De rerum natura iuxta propriis principiis (On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles, 1586) by Bernardino Telesio; and in the following months Campanella wrote his own Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Philosophy as Demonstrated by the Senses) in defense of this new philosophy of nature. In 1590 he was in Naples, where he made the acquaintance of Giambattista della Porta. He left for Rome in 1592 and then went to Florence and Padua, where he met Galileo. Denounced to the Inquisition, Campanella was arrested at the beginning of 1594 and in October was transferred to the Inquisition’s prison in Rome. Condemned on suspicion of heresy and forced to abjure, at the end of 1597 he was ordered to return to Calabria. In the summer of 1598 he was again in Stilo, where he soon became the inspiration behind a vast conspiracy against the Spanish, who at that time governed the Kingdom of Naples. In August 1599 two of the conspirators revealed the plot to the Spanish viceroy, who sent armed forces into Calabria to repress it. Campanella was imprisoned and in November was moved to Naples, where he was tried for heresy and rebellion. He managed to avoid the death penalty by feigning madness and was instead condemned to a lengthy detention in various Neapolitan fortresses. During the years of his incarceration, he dedicated himself to intense literary activity, composing his most famous works, aimed at producing a new foundation for the entire encyclopedia of knowledge. In 1612 he was visited by Tobias Adami, a German man of letters from Saxony who took it upon himself to publish some of Campanella’s most important writings in Frankfurt from 1617 to 1623. After almost 27 years in prison, Campanella was released from the Castel Nuovo in 1626 and arrived in Rome, where he remained in detention until early 1629. In October 1634 he was compelled to go into exile in France, following renewed Spanish suspicions regarding him. In Paris he was received with favor by King Louis XIII and by Cardinal Richelieu and was able to frequent learned circles. He wrote new political works and arranged for the printing of the first volumes of his Opera omnia, a project that remained incomplete at his death on May 21, 1639.