CAMPANELLA’S UTOPIA: THE CITY OF THE SUN
CAMPANELLA, Tommaso.
La città del sole. Traduzione del latino.
Lugano, G. Ruggia, 1836.
12mo, pp. xxxv, [i, blank], 79, [1, blank]; aside from very occasional light spotting, clean and fresh throughout, uncut in the original green printed wrappers; slightly sunned, and the odd small stain on upper cover, but a very good copy.
Rare first Italian translation of Campanella’s great early utopia Civitas solis.
The work, drawing heavily on Plato’s Republic, was originally written in Italian around 1602, during Campanella’s lengthy imprisonment in Naples; translated into Latin a decade later, it finally saw publication in Frankfurt in 1623, and Paris in 1638, both in the Latin version. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the need was felt for an Italian translation; the present translator, Giovanni Battista Passerini, hoped that the communistic ideas found in Campanella’s work would be enthusiastically received in 1830s Italy, so he commenced work on the present version. Based at the time in Zurich, and heavily influenced by Zwingli, he also translated works by Hegel and Fichte. In his lengthy introduction, Passerini sketches Campanella’s life, and places his writings in a modern context, emphasising their present-day relevance.
The ideas of all property being held in common, of no servants’ work and, at the same time, of no service being regarded as unworthy are joined with a contempt for idleness and of nobility, linked to inactivity and vice. Also appealing to the nineteenth-century reader would have been the prominent importance placed by Campanella on technologies and inventions.
Although the current rarity of this printing, and the fact that it was produced not in Italy but in Lugano, might suggest that Passerini’s ambitions for Campanellan influence in Italy were thwarted, several other editions, not only of the Civitas solis but also of other works, appeared in the coming decade, as part of a revival of interest in this previously neglected writer.
Outside Continental Europe, OCLC records two copies in the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), plus Harvard and the Library of Congress; no copies traced in UK institutions.
