Explore "The Story of Utopias" by Lewis Mumford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How Bacon and Campanella, who have a great reputation as utopians, are little better than echoes of the men who went before them.
A Genoese sea-captain is the guest of a Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller. This sea-captain tells him of a great country under the equator, dominated by the City of the Sun. The outward appearance of this country is a little strange -- the city with its seven rings named after the seven planets, and its four gates that lead to the four quarters of the earth, and the hill that is topped by a grand temple, and the walls covered with laws and alphabets and paintings of natural phenomena, and the Rulers -- Power, Wisdom, and Love -- with the learned doctors, Astrologus, Cosmographus, Arithmeticus, and their like: it is an apparition such as never yet was seen on land or sea. Small wonder, for this City of the Sun existed only in the exotic brain of a Calabrian monk, Tommaso Campanella, whose Utopia existed in manuscript before Andreae wrote his Christianopolis.