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Profilo storico | Historical Profile 27

mana, Gaspare Tribraco and Simone from Pavia, while in the following
century Humanities readers were excellent men as Filippo Valentini,
followed by Carlo Sigonio, who then moved to Venice.
It was in this field that the Humanities lectures built the scenery for a
cultural revival, which was mistrusted and then severely persecuted by
the religious authorities. In the forty years of the sixteenth century, in
fact, the Commune decided to hire a public reader of Greek at expenses
of the collectivity. Francesco Porto from Crete was the professor called
in Modena; he was involved in lectures of Greek history – he taught
Thucydides and the classics of Hellenic antiquity – and he joined in the
climate of revival and cultural fervour of the city. Particularly in Modena,
an intellectual circle was active in those years, known with the name of
Academy; it was composed of Humanists, Jurists, Philologists, Doctors
and ludimagistri (professors). Porto was part of it, and the teaching of the
Greek language was often applied, by him as well as by other Academ-
ics, not only to the classic texts but also to the Bible. It followed public
discussions on the truths of the faith, on the interpretation of this or that
extract of the Scriptures and, more in general, an opening to the free ex-
amination and to the critical spirit; this was hardly fought by the catholic
authorities and by the Inquisition tribunal, because of the dangerous
juxtaposition with the Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabaptist doctrines.
As it was already happened in many other realities, also in Modena the
presence of a study circle, the knowledge diffusion and the circulation
of men and books favoured the development of a new sensibility that,
in addition to the increasing of the knowledge in literary and philo-
logical field, had also supported the scientific tradition, embodied by
figures as Gabriele Falloppia, who, after having joined in the Academy
of Modena, wrote important pages for the medicine history.
The vivacity of the sixteenth-century season is also proved by another
episode, a curious event of “international” level, which occurred in

Bartolomeo Passarotti, Portrait of Carlo Sigonio, 16th century
Bust of Gabriele Falloppia, Anatomical Theatre hall, Modena