Tommaso Campanella

Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) was a Calabrian Dominican friar, philosopher and poet. He was imprisoned by the Spanish authorities in Naples for twenty-seven years after a failed conspiracy against Spanish rule in 1599, and wrote much of his philosophy, including the utopia The City of the Sun, in prison.

His Italian poems, the Scelta d’alcune poesie filosofiche, mix metaphysics, political protest and religious prophecy in sonnets and canzoni. They were first published in Germany in 1622. This selection of his sonnets is John Addington Symonds’s rhymed English version of 1878.