 Campanella’s first printed work, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, was written when the twenty-one year old Dominican friar was living in a monastery in the Calabrian village of Altomonte. It was published in Naples in 1591. The work is divided into eight disputationes (‘disputations’), in which he defends Telesio’s new philosophy of nature against the attack of the Aristotelian Giacomo Antonio Marta. In the preface Campanella traces the course of his intellectual development and presents the “new” aspects of his own thought. It is no accident that these pages begin with the word “truth,” depicted allegorically on the title-page as a sphere floating on water, as winds blowing from all sides threaten to submerge it and a young friar swims out to reach it. Truth can be hidden and persecuted, Campanella maintains, but it cannot be held prisoner by injustice; in the end it emerges from the darkness and is once again resplendent. These introductory pages offer us a lively account of the doubts of the young friar who, recalling the years he spent in Dominican monasteries in Calabria, cannot conceal his disillusionment. The works of ancient and modern philosophers have convinced him that human knowledge had become ever more obscure and confused because it had distanced itself progressively from the direct experience of nature and had turned instead to reading and commenting on books written by human beings. This attitude was particularly evident in the followers of Aristotle who directed their energies toward the words of their master, without attempting to compare them to the natural world. In this way philosophical research had degenerated into sophistical disputes and a series of pointless battles over words. Reflecting on all this, the young Campanella formed a conviction that he would never abandon: an adequate knowledge of things is one that comes from the things themselves, which we must investigate on the basis of sense experience.