The Academia Secretorum Naturae : magic, secrets and instruments of experimental science in the sixteenth-century Naples

This two-year EF will bring me at Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy), where I will be supervised by Prof. Marco Sgarbi.

The overall aim of the project is to provide the first, complete historical-philosophical reconstruction of the Academia secretorum naturae, one of the earliest Societies in Europe, to explore in an innovative way the ""secrets of nature"", by performing experiments in the field of physico-chemical and mechanical sciences.

The Academy was founded in Naples in 1560 by Giambattista Della Porta (1535-1615), one of the leading figures of the Italian Renaissance in natural philosophy, so much so, tha the echoes of his thought reached authors like Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Isaac Newton. The scientific activity of the Academy is able to be reconstructed by reading the ""Magia Naturalis"" by Della Porta.

A study on the experimentalism promoted in Naples by the Academia secretorum naturae, which is at the core of the project, will significantly influence our understanding of the Italian Renaissance and its contribution to the so-called Scientific Revolution/rise of experimentalism.

Research will aid in determining certain fundamental junctures between the shift from natural magic to the new science, clarifying the role of the peculiar empirical Aristotelianism, open to the instances of natural magic, mathematics, and practical knowledge, in vogue in the Naples of the 16th century; of the introduction of a clear codification of the experimental process of thesecrets of nature, as of a readily identifiable scientific instrumentation introduced in Della Porta's Academy.

The clarification of these two points will lead an understanding of how experimentalism, which developed in Italy during the Renaissance and spread throughout Europe thanks to the enormous popularity of ""Magia naturalis"", impacted the great European scientific academies of the 17th century.