 Leaving Switzerland, Boyle, along with Marcombes and his brother crossed the Alps and entered Italy in September 1641 where, in Florence, he spent the winter. “In Italy he read over the lives of the ancient philosophers with the utmost attention,” presumably in Diogenes Laertius, and “[t]he sect, which then struck him most, was that of the Stoics; and he tried his proficiency in their philosophy, by enduring a long fit of the tooth-ach with great  unconcernedness.”[9]  Still in Italy he had (in the winter of 41–42) what seems to have been one of the very few sexual encounters of his life. Writing about himself in the third person as Philaretus (sometimes P., or Filaretus) he says: