The City of the Sun
Tommaso Campanella 1602
A sea captain describes an imagined society in a dialogue with a religious knight. Its seven rings of walls display pictures that teach citizens about the world.
56 pages 1h 6m reading time
- One of the classic early utopias, often read alongside Thomas More's "Utopia" and Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis."
- Imagines a city where no one owns private property, everyone works only about four hours a day, and leaders are chosen for their knowledge and wisdom.
- Argues that a society should be built on reason and the study of nature, and that education can happen everywhere, even on the walls of a city.
- Its picture of a shared, planned society became an early model for later socialist and communist thinkers, who often counted it among the founding dreams of their ideas.
Written in a prison cell
The author wrote it around 1602 while jailed in Naples for plotting against Spanish rule in southern Italy.
Carried out by a friend
A German admirer, Tobias Adami, took the author's writings north and had a Latin version printed in Frankfurt.
Original waited centuries
The Italian text the author first wrote was not printed until nearly three centuries after the Latin edition.
Borrowed from Plato
It draws heavily on Plato's "Republic," an ancient Greek book that also imagines a city where people share property.
Translated from Italian by Thomas W. Halliday 1885