ABSTRACT
While they often imitated the structure of former institutions such as magistracies, guilds or confraternities, Italian academies were interested in subjects ranging from natural sciences to theatre, from poetry to politics, from language to music, from geography to the figurative arts — some academies had encyclopaedic interests. Membership included not only representatives of the upper class, famous pioneering scientists, or literary polemicists, but also people from lower classes, as was the case of the Sienese Accademia dei Rozzi, who nevertheless had a high level of literacy.2
