 This forms the context for his fundamental encounter with the philosophy of Telesio. Reading the first edition of De rerum natura iuxta propria principia, Campanella intuited, right from the beginning, the novelty and cogency of Telesio’s approach. In accordance with Campanella’s own aspirations, Telesio believed in deriving the truth from a direct examination of natural facts, so that the correct connections between words and things, which had gotten lost in the Aristotelian tradition, could now be re-established. Reviving and developing, in an original manner, a time-honored metaphor, Campanella affirmed that the philosophical investigator must read and study the “book of nature.” In a famous sonnet—he was also the author of an extraordinary collection of philosophical poetry—he stated: “The world is the book on which the Eternal Wisdom / wrote its own thoughts” (Poesie, 1998, p. 46). In order to construct an authentic natural philosophy, a continual comparison between the books written by human beings and the infinite book of nature was necessary, so as to correct the errors in the human “copies,” that were inevitably imperfect, partial and consequently in need of revision. In another sonnet, Campanella rendered homage to “Telesio from Cosenza” (“Telesio cosentino”) for having used his arrows to pierce and kill Aristotle, described as the “tyrant of minds”, and for having in this way restored to mankind the libertas philosophandi (freedom to philosophize), which is inseparable from the truth (Poesie, 1998, p. 278).