Antonio Rocco

Antonio Rocco (1586 to 1653) was an Italian priest, philosophy teacher and writer who graduated under Cesare Cremonini. He wrote Aristotelian commentaries with questions following the thought of Duns Scotus, among them paraphrases of the natural philosophy of Aristotle in 1623 and of his logic in 1627, and he published the Esercitationi filosofiche of 1633, in which, as a peripatetic philosopher, he considered the positions and objections in the dialogue of Galileo Galilei against the doctrine of Aristotle. He later lectured at the Venetian Academy of the Peripatetic Innovators and wrote a treatise on the immortality of the rational soul. He is best known for the satirical pederastic dialogue L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, written in 1630 and published in 1652, which was identified as his work in 1888 and was suppressed and largely destroyed after its appearance, so that only ten copies of the first printing survived.