Il natural desiderio di sapere - Pontifical Academy of Sciences

FEDERICO CESI, THE FIRST ACADEMY, AND UMBRIA 69Along with those already cited we cannot fail to mention otherUmbrian localities which offer firsthand testimony of the experience of thefirst Academy and its members. Among them is Spoleto, adoptive home ofthe young Heckius, who, just escaped from Deventer, his native city, wastaken in by the noble family of the Gelosi. It was in Spoleto that this freespirit wrote most of his juvenile works in Italian and he would return toSpoleto after his restless peregrinations around Europe. ‘Spoleto thus conservesfor us’, writes Gabrieli, ‘multiple memories, both representative andsuggestive, of the Lyncean Heckius in his early youth’. 97 After Spoleto alsoFoligno, to whose annual fair Fedrico Cesi came from Acquasparta or elsesent his German physician, Johann Baptist Winther to purchase suppliesof local and foreign ‘simples’; and then Assisi, Perugia, Gualdo, nearbyFabriano, home of Stelluti. And above all, Perugia, where, in 1601 Heckiustook his university degree, where Giusto Ricchio, later a Lyncean, alsostudied, and where another Lyncean, the jurist and mathematicianGiuseppe Neri (1586-1623) was born. 98More than any other Umbrian locality, Acquasparta, its Palace, and itsdelightful surrounding hamlets were witness to the splendid and courageousadventure of Federico and the first Lynceans. It is in his residencein Acquasparta, in the early months of 1604, that the young Federico takesrefuge, disappointed by familial misunderstandings, after the brief butexulting experience of communal meditation and study following thefoundation of the Academy. In 1609, when the four founders could finallymeet again, their first sessions were held in the cozy rooms of the Palace.And while as early as 1614 Federico begins to think with more insistenceto make the Palace the reference point for the activities of the Academy,working on creating the conditions to bring this about, it is from 1618 to1630, in the period of the institution’s most intense activity, that he decidesto adopt the Palace as his habitual place of residence, confident of findingthere, far away from the ‘harassing business’ of Rome, the necessary peaceto attend to the collegial organization of the work of the Academy, to theconduct of his scientific research. The palace is transformed from princelyresidence to scientific institution, to a place of scholarship in which areaccumulated books, manuscripts, engravings, investigative instruments.In these twelve years of industrious retreat, up to his sudden and prema-97 G. Gabrieli, Umbria cesiana e lincea. Appunti per un itinerario linceografico, op.cit., pp. 179-180.98 Ibid., pp. 180-181.