Nicola Antonio Stigliola

Nicola Antonio Stigliola, also called Colantonio Stelliola (1546 to 1623), was an Italian philosopher, printer, architect and medical doctor, born at Nola in the Kingdom of Naples. A friend of Tommaso Campanella and Giordano Bruno and a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, he adhered to Copernican heliocentrism and to Bruno's ideas on Hermeticism and magic, and believed in Pythagorean and Brunian cosmologies in which the planets and stars are like the earth, covered with plants and animals. He studied medicine at Salerno, took his degree in 1571, and lived in Naples, where he turned to architecture, teaching and surveying; he made a new survey of the kingdom and of the city of Naples, completed in 1595, with engraver Mario Cartaro. He ran the Typographia Stelliolae press from 1593 to 1606, printing at least eighty titles, was tried for heresy and imprisoned from 1595 to 1597, and wrote De gli elementi mechanici of 1597 and a posthumous work on the telescope.