L'idea di natura nell Italia normannosveva

Metascience, 2000

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2002

The Accademia del Cimento in seventeenth-century Florence has traditionally been seen as the first European organization to employ an experimental programme, thus becoming a major participant in the so-called ‘birth of modern experimental science’. Such traditional accounts have also detailed the cultural, political and religious environment of the period that contributed to the Accademia's use of a supposedly atheoretical experimental method. However, despite the merits of such cultural histories, these stories do not portray the full details behind the Accademia's intellectual workings – how knowledge claims were constructed, interpreted and presented by the academicians according to their natural philosophical concerns. It is argued here that such an analysis will provide a more accurate account of the Accademia's activities than existing stories about the birth of an experimental programme or method. By looking past the experimental rhetoric produced by the academici...

Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 1997

The American Historical Review, 1994

Isis, 1993

Making Science Public in 18th-century Europe: The Role of Cabinets of Experimental Philosophy, 2013

Count Giambattista Gazola of Verona (1757-1834) is well known by students of early modern natural history, thanks to the outstanding collection of fossil fish that he gathered in the 1780s and 1790s. On the contrary, little research has been done so far on the important cabinet of scientific instruments that the nobleman acquired in the same years. In this paper, I take advantage of a recent survey conducted on the scientific instruments museum and on the archives of Liceo Maffei, Verona – which received Gazola’s cabinet in 1802 – to outline the history and the main features of that collection. I will argue that scientific instruments and their display played a significant role in the self-fashioning of late 18th-century ruling classes in provincial Italy; in their appropriation of contemporary scientific practices and debates and above all, in the elaboration of a socially conservative natural philosophy. I will also show that the handover of Gazola’s cabinet to the newly-founded local “Liceo” was part of a momentous transition in the history of Italian scientific instruments collections, with deep implications for their characteristics, intended use and public role. A list of instruments included in Gazola’s cabinet is provided.

Cambridge History of Science vol. 8, 2020

The educated classes of the Italian peninsula developed an independent language from the thirteenth century, a scientific and technical language from about 1500, a single government and a national science policy after 1861. From the 1950s, they took part in efforts to create a European science policy. Some long-term relationships among science, culture, and society will be employed in the present chapter to introduce the reader to some turning points relevant to an understanding of the place and uses of modern science south of the Alps. Italian science will be approached as a sort of “natural experiment”, enabling the historian to put to test some of the factors that intertwine with the development of science. The conclusions will focus on what will be presented as the long-term persistence of the attitude displayed by early modern virtuosi and Italian elites vis-à-vis the prince. An attitude that managed to survive through the subsequent patterns of research institutions that were adopted. Combining, finally, with the pitfalls of an imagined national scientific community that continued to backfire.

Bruce T. Moran, ed., Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1991

I t: t: t: 26 William Eamon scientific inquiry. "In these centuries," wrote Rossi, "there was a continuous discussion, with an insistence that bordered on monotony, about a logic of [discovery] conceived as a aenatio, a huntas an attempt to penetrate ierritories never known or explored before."3 Instead of viewing science as a sort of hermeneutical exercise, an attemPt to demonstrate conclusions already known -,,natural philosophy without nature," asJohn Murdoch has aptly characterized late-medieval scienceintellectuals of the sixteenth century tended to think of science as an attemPt to discover things unknown, as a search for nature's ''secrets,' ' and as a ''voyage to remote and hidden regions of nature."4 Rossi's observation is borne out by numerous sixteenth-and seventeenth-century references to the hunt as a metaPhor for science-In the early sixteenth century the Neapolitan astrologer Giovanni Abioso urged scientists to throw out the books of the ancient philosophers a¡d to "hunt for new secrets of nature" (omari norta secreta naturu). Giambattista Della Porta (1535-1615) used the lynx, the legendary keen-sighted predator, as the emblem for his book on natural magic, and thereby inspired the name of the famous Accademia dei Lincei. Explaining the choice of the lynx as the society's emblem, Francesco Stelluti, one of the academy's PurPose was not to judge nature acco but to "penetrate into the inside of things in o the operations of nature that work internally, just as it is said of the lynx that it sees not just what is in front of it, but what is hidden inside."s In the seventeenth century, Sir Francis Bacon compared experimental science to ,,Pan's hunt," after the ancient god of hunting. Bacon read the myth of Pan allegorically to mean that ''the dìscovery of things useful to life . . . is not to be looked for from the abstract philosophies, as it were the greater gods, no not though they devote their whole Powers to that special endbut only from Pan; that is from sagacious experience and the universa-l knowledge of nature, which will often by a kind of accident, and as it were while engaged in hunting, stumble upon such discoveries."6