 Freed from prison in Naples in 1626, Campanella moved to Rome, where he lived until 1634. The most notorious episode of his Roman sojourn was connected to Pope Urban VIII’s desire to take advantage of his astrological expertise in order to counter the ever more insistent predictions of his imminent death, based on the inauspicious disposition of the stars. Called to the papal palace, Campanella put into effect the natural magic practices described in his short treatise De siderali fato vitando (How To Avoid the Fate Dictated by the Stars). Reprising themes borrowed from Marsilio Ficino, who had taught how to attract the favor of the stars, Campanella proposed to teach how to avoid the evils threatened by the stars through taking suitable precautions. The most famous and controversial pages of this work, since they deal with practices used on the pope, are those in which Campanella suggests remedies against the possible harm caused by eclipses and comets. When an eclipse appears to threaten a specific person, he counsels using every precaution to prevent the seeds carried in the polluted air from finding a favorable terrain and producing their noxious effects. He then explains how to demarcate a separate space that will be impenetrable to malign influences. With the doors and windows sealed, the air should be purified by sprinkling perfumes and scents and by burning aromatic woods such as laurel, myrtle, rosemary and cypress. In the room, decorated with foliage and fabric of white silk, one should set alight two lamps, five torches and other lights in order to represent the planets of the zodiac. It will also be useful to seek out the company of friends who are not subject to the negative effects of the eclipse, to play music connected with Jupiter and Venus, and to have recourse to all those “enticements,” connected with plants, stones, colors and odors, capable of attracting beneficent influences and countering malign ones. If the darkness of the eclipse seems to suspend and interrupt the life that flows from the heavens, it will be necessary to secure protection by constructing a sort of artificial sky. De fato was published in Lyons in 1629 as the seventh and final book of Campanella’s Astrologia. This risked compromising the pope himself by involving him in accusations of superstitious practices. Campanella was quick to write an Apologeticus in which he attempted to demonstrate that the practices recommended in De fato were not superstitious but rather entirely natural. In a further effort to avert any scandal, in the early months of 1632 Urban VIII hurriedly promulgated an extremely severe bull, Inscrutabilis, directed against astrologers. The pope also had Don Orazio Morandi, abbot of the monastery of Santa Prassede, in which astrological practices were entangled with shady political intrigues, imprisoned and put to death (see the introduction to Campanella, Opuscoli astrologici, pp. 41–42).