Giuseppe Campani, “Inventor Romae,” an Uncommon Genius

The ingenious and ambitious Campani brothers—Matteo, Pier Tommaso, and Giuseppe—were at the core of thriving activity of technological and scientific innovation that involved popes, the Sun King, and other rulers of baroque Europe. Especially Giuseppe’s outstanding production of innovating clocks, telescopes, and microscopes, attracted the attention of the most important scientific characters and experimental academies of the time. This posthumous book by Silvio Bedini is the result of a fifty-year-long study that will serve not just as a reference work for scholars interested in seventeenth-century clockmaking, practical optics, astronomy, and science and technology in general, but it also will provide you with unique insights into the scientific and technological landscape of baroque Rome and its links to a broader European scene. The author's narrative style and the many illustrations which accompany the story, make this book also for non-specialists an enjoyable read.