Tommaso Campanella 
The City of the Sun 

First published in 1602, ‘The City of the Sun’ is a utopia written by the Dominican Friar Tommaso Campanella. 



This short story is a dialogue between a grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers and a Genoese Sea-captain, about the latter’s voyage to a utopian city. 

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Campanella’s imaginary city is what might be called its architecture of knowledge. The city is made up of a number of walls upon each of which are inscribed all the knowledge of a particular set of sciences. On the outer wall are inscribed all the truths of mathematics, on the second metallurgy, geography, meteorology, the third botany, the next biology of fish, insects, reptiles, the one that follows the biology of large animals, then the mechanical arts, and finally history, war, philosophy, religion and law…