Pictured above is a drawing of Tommaso Cornelio, Lionardo’s good friend and co-founder of the Accademia degli Investiganti.
finding my place
I wasn’t sure where my place might be on Adele (DiCapoa) Lord’s family tree. The oval from the seventeenth century that contained Lionardo’s info united us in a quest that went beyond our blood relationship. We were determined to pursue Lionardo’s history. We began by locating Lionardo’s life story – La Vita di Lionardo DiCapua – in a library in northern Italy. The author, Nicollo Amenta, was an inducted member of the Arcadia in Rome. The Arcadia was a sort-of hall-of-fame of Italian scientists and artists begun by the Queen Christina of Sweden. Amenta wrote his book about fellow member Lionardo after Lionardo died.
the book
The book was in old Italian. It took Adele and I a few months of meetings to translate it. What we learned from the La Vita, from other sources, and from trips that I made to Bagnoli, Irpino, Rome, and Naples was that Lionardo was a gifted child. He was orphaned at a young age and sent to Naples around age 12 to study with the Jesuits. He began writing plays and poems and essays as a young man first pursuing legal studies then entering medical school.
thought leaders
Over time he became part of a wide circle of progressive thinkers that lived in the Kingdom of Naples. The powerful Spanish monarchy controlled the Kingdom, as well as much of the rest of Europe, plus vast colonies in the new world. The counter revolution against the Protestant Reformation was in full swing during the seventeenth century with the Spanish as the most ardent supporters of the Catholic Church. Physicians were trained to follow the principles of treatment handed down from the Roman physician Galen, 1500 hundred years earlier.
tommaso cornelio
A formal medical hierarchy, supported by the Church, enforced Galen’s teachings such that it was risky to question them. But Lionardo and his close friend, Tommaso Cornelio, established the Academy of the Investigators to offer a new method. This method was based on experimentation and careful study that challenged Galenic medicine (and by extension the Catholic Church). Tommaso Cornelio and Lionardo’s ideas connected them to the most progressive scientific societies throughout Europe. Although, in those days, especially in the Kingdom of Naples, it took a great deal of fortitude and courage to support the Investigators’ beliefs.
thirty years war
This evolving world of science and medicine was enfolded within a century that included:
- the horrendous Thirty Years War
- a major eruption of Mount Vesuvius with associated earthquakes and tsunamis
- a bloody political revolution throughout the Kingdom that lasted for nearly a year
- a virulent outbreak of the plague that killed somewhere between a half to two-thirds of the population of Naples, at the time the largest city in Europe.
three decades later
With Adele’s help and that of others, it has taken me nearly three decades to research Lionardo’s life and times and write it down. The book that I have written is a work of historical fiction supported by a great deal of history around some fictional sections dealing with Lionardo’s life that were added because a true accounting could not, and probably never will be known. The author is a fictional English physician, at one time a protege of Lionardo’s, narrating the story in 1731.
Thanks for reading. Please continue reading Part 5 of my blog, Searching for Lionardo DiCapua.
