ABSTRACT
Santa Chiara, beloved of Neapolitans, lifts its ruined but still graceful tower above the serried rooftops of the city. The cultural 'risorgimento' in Naples which reached its zenith in the last decades of the seventeenth century had its first stirrings in the work of Camillo Colonna and received a major impetus from the return from Rome, in 1649, of Tommaso Cornelio. Giambattista Vico introduces his account of this new era in his life and career with the intriguing problem of his 'authors', those writers to whom he attributes a supreme influence over the formation of his thought. The life which he thus, not without misgivings, ventured to communicate to the world was an obscure life, its riches wholly inward and of the spirit. Certain criticisms raised against this prolusion sharpened his determination to affect his project; and it was as a first answer to these objections that he published the Sinopsi.
