Lorenzo Magalotti

Lorenzo Magalotti was an Italian philosopher, writer, diplomat and poet, born in Rome in 1637 into an aristocratic family and dying in 1712. Educated at the Collegio Romano and the University of Pisa, where he turned from law and medicine to mathematics under Vincenzo Viviani, he became secretary of the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the group of Galileo's pupils who saw observation as their task. He wrote the academy's only publication, the Saggi di naturali Esperienze, an account of experiments on temperature, air pressure, the speed of sound and light, magnetism and electrical bodies. Starting as one of the most ardent followers of Galileo, he grew distressed at the rivalries among the members, gradually lost interest in science, and became a traveller, an ambassador and in the end a poet, translating John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Philips's Cyder into Italian. His philosophical interests survive in the Lettere scientifiche, ed erudite, twenty essays in letter form published in 1721, eight of them on philosophical and scientific subjects.