Campanella

The book tells the story of the life and work of the great Italian philosopher-utopian, Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639). Born to a poor shoemaker, even in his youth he amazed his mentors with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, phenomenal memory, and boldness of scientific judgment. It is not surprising that his entire subsequent life was spent fighting against the rigidity of the scholastic science of the time. For more than three and a half decades, Campanella was imprisoned by the Inquisition, enduring monstrous tortures (one of which lasted 36 hours). But neither his spirit, nor his will, nor his powerful mind were broken; it was during his imprisonment, mostly in secret, that Campanella wrote his brilliant philosophical, religious, and political treatises, the most famous of which is the utopia "The City of the Sun," where the monk-philosopher ingeniously embodied the socialist ideals of early Christianity.