Despite extensive study of the Galileo affair in recent years, there are still some important documents relating to the case which have received little attention in the English-speaking world. In his translation of Thomas Campanella's Apologia pro Galileo, Richard J. Blackwell presents for the first time in English a reliable and highly readable translation of this important and neglected work. Campanella, the maverick Dominican, sought to head off the confrontation between Galileo and the theologians by defending Galileo's right to develop, debate, and publish his ideas freely. By making available at last a well-documented English version of this treatise--one in which the theological dimensions of the dispute receive their clearest presentation yet--Blackwell makes a worthy contribution to a heightened awareness of the doctrinal issues in the Galileo affairs. Written in 1616 while Campanella was imprisoned by the Inquisition, the Apologia pro Galileo was banned in Rome at the time of its publication in 1622, therefore having little influence on the outcome of the Galileo case. However, then as now it stands as an important document calling for intellectual freedom as related to the Galileo case in particular, and as a plea for intellectual freedom in general.

“Congestion is the life of the city . . . it is what we came for, what we stay for, what we hunger for”, wrote Charles Downing Lay, prominent American landscape architect and planner of the early 1920s. These words are relevant today as density and congestion are once again under siege, especially in our most productive and thriving cities. Published in 1926, The Freedom of the City by Charles Downing Lay is an eloquent and timely defence of urbanism and city life. Award-winning author and urban historian Thomas J. Campanella has given Lay’s text new life and relevance, with the addition of explanatory notes, imagery, an introduction, and biographical essay, to bring this important work to a new generation of urbanists. Lay was decades ahead of his time, writing The Freedom of the City as Americans were just beginning to fall in love with the automobile and leave town for a romanticised life on the suburban fringe. Planners and theorists were arguing that heavily congested cities were a form of cancer, that great metropolitan centres like London and New York City must be decanted into a leafy “garden cities” in the countryside. Lay saved his sharpest pen for these anti-urbanists in his own profession of city and regional planning. Lay writes of the delights of city life and – especially - that importance of the singular, essential ingredient that makes it all possible: “congestion” (closest in definition to “density” today). Congestion, to Lay, is the secret sauce of cities, the singular element that gives London, Paris, or New York its dynamism and magic. He believed that the amenities and affordances of a city are “the direct result of its great congestion”; indeed, congestion is “the life of the city. Reduce it below a certain point and much of our ease and convenience disappears. Campanella writes “for all his blind spots, Lay's core argument still obtains. The Freedom of the City was prescient in 1926 and timely now. Certainly, the essentials of good urbanism extolled in the book- human scale, diversity, walkability, the serendipities of the street; above all, density - are articles of faith among architects and urbanists today.”

PLUTARCH'S LYCURGUS MORE'S UTOPIA BACON'S NEW ATLANTIS CAMPANELLA'S CITY OF THE SUN AND A FRAGMENT OF HALL'S MUNDUS ALTER ET IDEM WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON

"Civitas solis" from Thomas Campanella. Thomas Campanella (1568-1639), theologus, philosophus poetasque italicus.