Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679)

Borelli’s career can be divided into four different stages: his education in Naples and Rome; his tenure as mathematics professor at Messina; his time in Florence; and finally, his last years in southern Italy. Consequently the following account of Borelli’s life and works follows those four phases. We shall see that although several details of Borelli’s life remain ambiguous, such as his reasons for relocating at different points in his career, the lack of documentation regarding his personal motivations does not prevent us from carefully examining his life and works, or from gathering clues regarding his intellectual, social, and political concerns. In particular, through the available primary and secondary sources regarding Borelli’s career, we shall gain an understanding of the natural philosophical skills and commitments he brought to the construction, interpretation, and presentation of experiments inside the Accademia del Cimento.