Notes to Chapter 133 Salzilli contributed eleven Italian sonnets, three canzoni, and one ottava to Lodovico
Grignani, ed., Poesie de’ Signori Accademici Fantastici di Roma (Rome, 1637). See James
Freeman, “Milton’s Roman Connection” in Urbane Milton, ed. Freeman and Anthony
Low (Pittsburgh, 1984), 90–1.
34 Estelle Haan’s translation in “Written Encomiums,” Milton in Italy, ed. Di Cesare, 526–
7.
35 The title in the 1645 Poems is Ad Salsillum poetam Romanum aegrotantem. Scazontes,
Poemata, 70.
36 A letter of April 4, 1644 from Salzilli indicates that he survived at least until that date.
See Freeman, “Milton’s Roman Connection,” 97.
37 Milton does not follow the requirement that the penultimate foot be iambic; in 19 out
of 41 lines he has a spondee in that fifth foot. He seems to have allowed himself, in
Latin, the greater license of Greek scazons.
38 See Freeman, “Milton’s Roman Connection,” 96–100; Haan, “Written Encomiums,”
526–31; and Haan, From Academia to Amicitia, 81–98.
39 Ll. 31–2, “Sic ille charis redditus rursum Musis / Vicina dulci prata mulcebit cantu.”
Translation, Haan, From Academia to Amicitia, Appendix, 187.
40 See Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion (Geneva, 1985), 245–51,
282–5. “N” was the customary designation when the given name was not known to
the scribe.
41 Evelyn, Diary, II, 282–3. Evelyn met there the mathematician Athanasius Kircher and
also the historian and poet Famianus Strada.
42 Chaney, The Grand Tour, 244–51.
43 Poemata p. 4, in Poems, 1645, “Ad Joannem Miltonum. Graecia Maeonidem, jactet sibi
Roma Maronem, / Anglia Miltonum jactat utrique parem.”
44 Wood, col. 130. But Wood’s source, a letter from William Joyner, suggests merely that
their time overlapped, not that they met. Gawan had “been at Rome with the
antimonarchical Mr. Milton, though as he told me, unacquainted with him.” See Parker,
II, rev. Campbell, p. 1,229; Chaney, The Grand Tour, 389–92; and Allan Pritchard,
“Milton in Rome,” MQ 14 (1980), 92–7.
45 See Margaret Byard, “ ‘Adventrous Song’: Milton and the Music of Rome,” Milton in
Italy, ed. Di Cesare, 305–28, and Lacy Collinson-Morley, Italy after the Renaissance (Lon-
don, 1930), 84–8. Early examples of opera were Monteverdi’s Arianna (1607) and Orfeo
(1608).
46 Bernardino Telesio (1509–88) attacked medieval Aristotelianism and abstract reason,
laying some groundwork for the scientific method and empiricism; his De natura rerum
iuxta propria principia (Naples, 1565, 1586) was placed on the Index. Giordano Bruno
(1548–1600) was forced to leave Italy in 1563 due to his views on transubstantiation
and the Immaculate Conception; after several years he returned, and was burned at the
stake in Rome, chiefly for his belief in multiple worlds and his Pantheistic tendencies.
47 See Luigi Salvatorelli, A Concise History of Italy, trans. Bernard Miall (New York, 1940),
415–50; Collinson-Morley, Italy After the Renaissance, 31–54. Campanella is best known
for his utopian Cittá del sole (City of the Sun) (1623), guided by experimental science
and based on collectivism; it may have been meant as a sketch for the constitution of
Naples, should it become a free city. He composed most of his philosophical works and
some sonnets in prison.
Notes to Chapter 4