Taming tempestuous Ziz. Weather knowledge in the early modern Italian peninsula

The Florentine Accademia del Cimento is the first European society to put experimentation at the core of scientific activity and to be supported by a public power. It lasted only ten years (1657-1667), the same years that saw the establishment of societies of greater fame and longevity such as the Royal Society and the Académie Royale des Sciences. But what exactly was its intellectual and philosophical-natural substratum? Starting from an epistemological analysis of some lists of books and authors, one of which was codified in a symbolic representation of a sort of pyramid of knowledge – moving from Aristotle up to Galileo – this intervention aims to re-trace the intellectual background of the Academy, especially from the point of view of meteorology. In fact, the use of such lists was not only functional to define the identity of the Academy through a collectivity of philosophers of the past, but also to build an experimental programme, which was influenced by works ranging from the Timaeus and the Meteorologica to Cabeo's Commentaria and the production of the Paracelsian medical doctors. It is also important to look at the absences on these lists: the exclusion of certain authors and works in favour of others is in fact another valuable source for reconstructing the Academy's philosophical and intellectual background, providing us with precious indications about the position the academics wanted to occupy in the European scientific panorama. This kind of analysis will therefore make it possible to develop a reflection on the relationship between the public power, the various actors involved and the experimental programme of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II and his brother Leopold. In fact Ferdinand II, had already set up the first European meteorological network, the Rete Medicea, and brought together a circle of courtiers-natural philosophers to carry out experiments and speculations almost entirely in the meteorological field.