Revaluating Philosophy: Campanella’s Commentaria and the “Collegio Barberino Project”

The Roman years of Tommaso Campanella, from 1626 to 1634, were made possible by the protection and patronage of the pope Urbano VIII Barberini. It is not surprising that one of his largest works of these years were in strict connection with the cultural production of the pope himself: Urbano VIII, Maffeo Barberini, had cultivated poetry from his youth and was a well-versed poet in Latin and a very talented one in Italian. Campanella composed from 1627 to 1631 three series of lengthy Commentaria on the Poemata, the book of Maffeo’s Latin poems, of which in the same 1631 the Vatican typography published an official edition – but the Poemata were by more than ten years a real bestseller in Italy and in France. What (actually) are the Commentaria? This complex, full-length bunch of manuscripts is often dismissed as pure flattery or as another strange, slightly delirious fruit of the exalted mind of the prophet-monk, basically cut out from the cultural edifice erected with his main philosophical system. Indeed, we think that Commentaria are not only part of the edifice, but that they were seen by their author – at least in the happy Roman years – as its new grounds, posited to reinforce it and shedding on the complex of the philosophical work a new light: the light of a system, and the reassuring clarity of a pedagogy. With his Commentaria Campanella tries to found a new educational system fitted for the city and the cultural needs of the élite. And when the city is Rome and the élite is the well paid cultural court gathering around pope Urbano VIII Barberini at the culmination of his fortune, every foundation has the character of a total revaluation where languages are rewritten from scratch and reorganized in a design coordinating all knowledges and arts