Some of the most fertile scientific and magical minds of the 17th century came together at the Academy of Idlers. Nicholas Jubber follows them back to old Napoli

May 1611: in the cloister of the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the heart of old Naples, a new society was founded. In tune with the ironic humour of the Italian seicento – that lively century when Naples was one of the cultural lodestones of Europe – it was called the Accademia degli Oziosi, or the Academy of Idlers. But when it came to intellectual activity, the Oziosi were as fertile as a tribe of da Vincis.

The opening ceremony, attended by the Spanish viceroy, was a clustering of scholars, courtiers and aristocrats. Some of its members might have fancied themselves as rebels, iconoclastic in their thinking, challenging established pieties (whether supporting Galileo, railing against the Spanish occupation of Naples or debunking the popular superstition that garlic can disempower magnets), but in founding the academy they were following convention. Academies were all the rage, and often gave themselves satirical names (such as the Academy of Eccentrics established a few years earlier in Venetian-run Crete, the Indifferenti of Bologna, or the Umoristi of Rome). But the work produced by many of the Oziosi “idlers” shows them to be true pioneers.

The most productive was Giovanni Battista della Porta, a polymath in his 70s, and a veteran of science and the occult who had founded the first scientific society, the Academy of Secrets, three decades earlier. He had written a seminal work on natural magic, perfected the camera obscura, developed one of the early telescopes, helped to create a communication system with magnetic needles that anticipated the telegraph, and written more than 20 plays, including comedy, tragedy and liturgical drama. He was also an expert cryptographer who could write secret messages on the insides of eggs. So it’s little wonder he was known as the Professor of Secrets.

Another wildly productive member was Giambattista Basile, who was in his 30s at this time: a courtier who had fought for Venice against the Ottoman Turks (joining the Academy of Eccentrics along the way), had served in numerous courts across the peninsula, written satires, masquerades, eclogues and verse dramas, and was in the process of compiling 50 folk tales into Europe’s first integral fairy tale collection. The Tale of Tales (published 1634-6) included the earliest full versions in Western literature of “Cinderella” (or “Cenerentola”) and “Rapunzel” (known in Basile’s version as “Petrosinella”), along with early, influential versions of “Sleeping Beauty”, “Puss-in-Boots” and many other tales. A couple of centuries later, the Brothers Grimm would praise The Tale of Tales as one of the great story collections, “in every respect a superb book”. It was adapted into a film in 2015, starring Salma Hayek and John C Reilly.

Other members of the Oziosi included the historian and jurist Francesco de Pietri, the chronicler Giulio Cesare Cappaccio and the scientist Ferrante Imperato, whose house became a popular museum and whose herbarium included numerous newly classified plants from the New World. These were just a few of the academy’s roughly 150 members, brought together by one of the period’s great artistic patrons, the Marquis of Villa, Giovanni Battista Manso. He was a one-man arts council whose patronage of poets and artists enabled many careers to flourish. Among those he took under his wing were the popular poet Giambattista Marino (whose striking shifts in scale inspired their own adjective, “marinismo”, depicted, for example, in a poem about a man lost in his lover’s hair), and the painter Caravaggio, on the run from a murder charge in Rome, who Manso commissioned to produce one of his masterpieces, The Seven Acts of Mercy, in which biblical motifs were channelled through strikingly realistic scenes of Neapolitan street-life.

Caravaggio’s painting – which still hangs in the same spot for which it was painted – is the perfect starting point to imagine Naples in the seicento. It’s in the octagonal chapel of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, behind a five-arched portico and the sombre gaze of marble saints, off the narrow, clotted street of the Via dei Tribunali in the heart of Old Naples. There, in the mobile light of the troubled genius’s canvas, you see a pauper grovelling naked on the floor, a man drinking from an animal bone, a woman giving her breast to a thirsty prisoner: a multi-layered painting that glorified its commissioners but also pointed out the crowded poverty over which they presided.

Members of the Oziosi were well aware of the contradictions of Naples in the seicento. It was Europe’s most populous city, with more than 300,000 citizens. One of the members, Giulio Capaccio, summed it up for posterity: “in every street, in every alley, in every corner is to be seen a crowd of people, pressing, pushing and pursuing their callings”. But, for all the discomfort, Capaccio insisted: “There is nobody who does not desire to see it (Naples), and does not desire to die here.” Or, as the tourist brochures put it today: “See Naples and die.”

Members of the academy recognised the injustices that flourished around them. In his fairy tales, Basile mocked the hypocrisies of city and (especially) courtly life, often through the mouths of wise rustics and observant ogres. “I could go on and on about the deceits perpetrated,” declares an ogre in one of the tales, “ – buffoons rewarded, scoundrels esteemed, lazybones honoured, assassins protected…”

Basile and his fellow Academy idler, Cortese, composed much of their work in the Neapolitan dialect, railing against the occupation of the Spanish. In one of his tales, Basile compares a parasite to “an occupying soldier”, a reference that would have been all too apparent to contemporary readers, if not to the Academy’s regular Spanish visitors, including the acclaimed playwright Lope de Vega and the poet Francisco de Quevedo. Members of the academy, and especially their leader Manso, also attended the prison where the philosopher Tommaso Campanella had been incarcerated and tortured for conspiring against the Spanish rulers. In various fortresses, including the Castle of Saint Elmo, on the Vomero Hill overlooking Naples, Campanella wrote his seminal work, The City of the Sun (published 1623), which envisioned a society where not only “all things are common” but “both sexes are instructed in all the arts together”. In a striking swipe at the hierarchy of his day, Campanella wrote: “they laugh at us in that we consider our workmen ignoble, and hold those to be noble who have mastered no pursuit”.

The contradictions are what make academies like the Oziosi so intriguing: men of extraordinary privilege, like the nobleman Manso, were wrestling with new ideas in science, philosophy and how to think about the construction of society. Pricked by the likes of Campanella, or by the bawdy humour of Basile, they were questioning the feudal structures in which they had flourished for so long, while simultaneously composing encomiastic verses and contributing to official Oziosi productions, such as a celebratory account of Naples published in 1613.

It’s easy to dismiss the Academy of Idlers as wine-swigging toffs, complacently punning and debating arcane issues such as the difference between sorcery and natural magic, or whether glass balls were effective at smoothing the forehead. But this is to overlook the topsy-turvy world in which the academicians existed: their most productive member, Giovanni Battista della Porta, was examined by the Inquisition, forced to disband his Academy of Secrets, and saw some of his books prohibited by the Church; Campanella spent 27 years in prison; and Basile’s works express the fraught life of the courtiers who made up most of the academy’s membership: “One minute he’s raised high on the palm of the hand, the next he’s thrown down to the bottom of the barrel… But he’s wasting his time, his work, and his seed, since everything is done for the wind, everything is thrown to sea.” Basile was living testament to this unstable lifestyle, hurled from one court to another until he found himself working as a regional governor in a small town near Mount Vesuvius, caught an infection from an eruption of the volcano, and died.

That was just a few years before the Idlers received their most famous British visitor – the young poet John Milton, who would record his thanks for Manso’s hospitality in his early panegyric “Mansus”, a poem in which Milton evoked bards of English tradition as well as Italian poets such as Torquato Tasso (who was another of Manso’s protegées), and wrestled with the relationship between classical literature and the modern vernacular, looking ahead to his own remarkable future. Expressing thanks to a patron who “does not scorn the good muse from faraway”, though she had “been barely nourished under the icy Arctic”, Milton celebrated the “fortunate old man” who welcomed him to Naples and helped him develop the cultural underpinnings to his future greatness.

As Milton pointed out, Manso was an old man by this time, in his late 60s; the heyday of the Idlers was passing, and although the academy continued after Manso’s death, it produced far less published material, and gathered less celebrated figures. Fresh academies were emerging, drawing in a new generation of scholars; and it was in Rome and elsewhere that the fire of intellectual leadership was burning more brightly. But the Oziosi had led the way, and for a couple of decades they had gathered some of the most productive, prolific thinkers in Europe. “Non pigra quies” was their motto: “a tranquillity not useless”. Their moniker may have been “Idlers”, but like so many who take that name, they had been far from idle in output.

This article is from Idler #87.

Subscribe here and get 12% off the shop price plus a FREE copy of Idle Thoughts by Tom Hodgkinson, worth £8.95.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below.

A Drink with the Idler

“A Drink with the Idler” returns in January. It’s FREE to subscribers.

Our December 2025 issue featuring Stewart Lee is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.