Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer from the 1600s who caused a major controversy with the Catholic Church.
On 26 February 1616, Galileo Galilei was formally banned and banished by the Roman Catholic Church for teaching and defending the opinion that the Earth orbits the Sun. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial.
It is commonly believed that the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo for abandoning the geocentric (earth-at-the-center) view of the solar system for the heliocentric (sun-at-the-center) view.
On April 12, 1633, Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy against the Church.
When Galileo (1564-1642) first published his Dialogo in 1632, defending the Copernican heliocentric view of our cosmos, the Catholic Church put him under house arrest and banned not just the Dialogo but also all of Galileo’s earlier writings. This censorship only fueled the demand for his works and several editions of his writings were published in France, England and the Netherlands throughout the 17th century.
But as far as Italian editions were concerned, the 1710 printing of the Dialogo was only the second of its kind, due to the fact that it remained on the Index of Forbidden Books. And so it should not come as a surprise that an identifying printer’s mark or publisher’s device was missing from the volume. With this information missing, how do we know who was responsible for this clandestine undertaking? And that it had indeed taken place in Naples instead of Florence?
The sources which were consulted enlightened us to the fact that the introductory letter to the reader at the beginning of the volume provides us with an important clue: the signature Cellenio Zacclori is (with the exception of one missing letter) an anagram for Lorenzo Ciccarelli, a Neapolitan lawyer who ran a print shop in Naples that specialized in the publication of forbidden books.
According to Vincenzo Ferrone, there is evidence that Ciccarelli’s shop was tolerated by some of the more progressive members of the Catholic Church, which helps to explain how he was able to elude shut-down by the authorities.