The Palace of Atlas

Abstract

In October 1594, the suspects entered the prison of the Holy Office, where the famous philosopher Giordano Bruno and the Florentine heretic Francesco Pucci were already being held. Colantonio Stigliola, whom Campanella had already encountered in Naples, would also later be brought there. Drawing on the popular belief, according to which the ‘timid and smiling’ weasel experiences an irresistible and fatal attraction for the toad, ‘the monster that then devours it,’ Campanella spoke in a beautiful sonnet, titled Al carcere (‘To Prison’), of the inevitability of the encounter of free spirits in such a terrible place, which he compares to the cavern of Polyphemus, the labyrinth at Crete, the palace of Atlas. These were spirits who had abandoned the ‘stagnant pond’ of trite conventional knowledge, in order to launch themselves boldly upon ‘the ocean of the truth.’ We know nothing of possible conversations with Bruno, even though it is not completely absurd to hypothesize that - beyond, obviously, the explicit references to the Nolan, chiefly regarding cosmological issues - some of the echoes (subterranean and hidden, to be sure) of Bruno that lurk in some parts of Campanella’s work could be the result of direct communication.