Umanisti e Lincei. Letteratura e scienza a Roma nell'età di Galileo

[Autom. eng. transl.] In the four chapters, all unpublished, that make up the book (I: Virginio Cesarini, Galileo and the Accademia dei Lincei; II: Rome 1623: literature and civil life; III: Agostino Mascardi between academy and new science; IV: Humanists and Lincei : the 'vitae' of Virginio Cesarini), the influence exerted by the figure and the work of Galileo on some writers such as Virginio Cesarini, Agostino Mascardi and Giovanni Ciampoli is reconstructed. Through the analysis of widely ignored and often rare texts, the first signs of what will later be called the conflict between the 'two cultures' are followed with particular attention. The first chapter reconstructs the biographical and intellectual story of Virginio Cesarini, a character deeply embedded in the ideal lincea of Prince Cesi and a precious supporter of the gelilean cause also from the pages of the 'Saggiatore'. In the central chapters we focus on the 'humanist' Agostino Mascardi whose 'Pompe del Campidoglio', published in 1624, represent the civil and literary 'manifesto' of the closest collaborators of Urban VIII in the aftermath of the new pontiff's establishment. The writing by Mascardi proposes an idea of a magnanimous and liberal 'prince', as well as alien to the practice of nepotism, but also a hypothesis of literature that moves on the main line of tradition and capable of constituting a classicistic alternative to the fortune of Marino and of his followers. The intense activity of cultural promotion carried out in the Roman academies of the early seventeenth century is also brought to light by Mascardi and the threads of his unexpectedly intense dialogue with the new Galilean science are renewed. Analyzing some 'vitae' of Virginio Cesarini, who died prematurely in 1624, the last chapter reveals the tensions present in Rome between the Jesuits and the philo-Galileian Academy of Prince Cesi after the release of the 'Saggiatore' and illustrates the attempt made by the Lincei to propose an exclusively scientific image of Cesarini, in opposition to the 'humanistic' biography of the Linceo man of letters outlined in the funeral oration read by the Mascardi at the Academy of the Humorists.