Campanella Tommaso (1568–1639), Italian theologian, philosopher, and poet. He joined the Dominican order in 1582. Most of the years between 1592 and 1634 he spent in prison for heresy and for conspiring to replace Spanish rule in southern Italy with a utopian republic. He fled to France in 1634 and spent his last years in freedom. Some of his best poetry was written while he was chained in a dungeon; and during less rigorous confinement he managed to write over a hundred books, not all of which survive. His best-known work, The City of the Sun (1602; published 1623), describes a community governed in accordance with astrological principles, with a priest as head of state. In later political writings, Campanella attacked Machiavelli and called for either a universal Spanish monarchy with the pope as spiritual head or a universal theocracy with the pope as both spiritual and temporal leader. His first publication was Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses (1591), which supported the theories of Telesio and initiated his lifelong attack on Aristotelianism. He hoped to found a new Christian philosophy based on the two books of nature and Scripture, both of which are manifestations of God. While he appealed to sense experience, he was not a straightforward empiricist, for he saw the natural world as alive and sentient, and he thought of magic as a tool for utilizing natural processes. In this he was strongly influenced by Ficino. Despite his own difficulties with Rome, he wrote in support of Galileo. See also FICINO, TELESIO. E.J.A.