This first edition was badly printed in Germany on very bad paper, without the name of press or place.  Besides the poems, it contained a brief prose commentary by the editor, the value of which is still very great, since we have the right to suppose that Adami’s explanations embodied what he had received by word of mouth from Campanella.  The little book bore this title:—­’Scelta d’ alcune poesie filosofiche di Settimontano Squilla cavate da’ suo’ libri detti La Cantica, con l’esposizione, stampato nell’ anno MDCXXII.’  The pseudonym Squilla is a pun upon Campanella’s name, since both Campana and Squilla mean a bell; while Settimontano contains a quaint allusion to the fact that the philosopher’s skull was remarkable for seven protuberances.[12] A very few copies of the unpretending little volume were printed; and none of these seem to have found their way into Italy, though it is possible that they had a certain circulation in Germany.  At any rate there is reason to suppose that Leibnitz was not unacquainted with the poems, while Herder, in the Renaissance of German literature, published free translations from a few of the sonnets in his ‘Adrastea.’

To this circumstance we owe the reprint of 1834, published at Lugano by John Gaspar Orelli, the celebrated Zurich scholar.  Early in his youth Orelli was delighted with the German version made by Herder; and during his manhood, while residing as Protestant pastor at Bergamo, he used his utmost endeavours to procure a copy of the original.  In his preface to the reprint he tells us that these efforts were wholly unsuccessful through a period of twenty-five years.  He applied to all his literary friends, among whom he mentions the ardent Ugo Foscolo and the learned Mazzuchelli; but none of these could help him.  He turned the pages of Crescimbeni, Quadrio, Gamba, Corniani, Tiraboschi, weighty with enormous erudition—­and only those who make a special study of Italian know how little has escaped their scrutiny—­but found no mention of Campanella as a poet.  At last, after the lapse of a quarter of a century, he received the long-coveted little quarto volume from Wolfenbuttel in the north of Germany.  The new edition which Orelli gave to the press at Lugano has this title:—­’Poesie Filosofiche di Tommaso Campanella pubblicate per la prima volta in Italia da Gio.  Gaspare Orelli, Professore all’ Universita di Zurigo.  Lugano, 1834.’  The same text has been again reprinted at Turin, in 1854, by Alessandro d’Ancona, together with some of Campanella’s minor works and an essay on his life and writings.  This third edition professes to have improved Orelli’s punctuation and to have rectified his readings.  But it still leaves much to be desired on the score of careful editorship.  Neither Orelli nor D’Ancona has done much to clear up the difficulties of the poems—­difficulties in many cases obviously due to misprints and errors of the first transcriber; while in one or two instances they allow patent blunders to pass uncorrected.  In the sonnet entitled ‘A Dio’ (D’Ancona, vol. i. p. 102), for example, bocca stands for buca in a place where sense and rhyme alike demand the restitution of the right word.