addition to the Baroque, the great event featuring the civilization from the seventeenth century represented a profound movement of renewal in the field of scientific culture that runs through the whole of Europe. Such a radical transformation of the method was so great and the discoveries that result from this experience was described as "scientific revolution", judging rightly one of the milestones in human history. In fact, if we consider together the rhythms of the historical evolution, we see how science and technology for millennia have remained essentially property: from antiquity to the Renaissance, except for some important but isolated discoveries or inventions (gunpowder, the compass, printing), life had continued to unfold in the same way, with the same energy sources, the same means of transport, the same production techniques. The parable of this great cultural revolution extends for about a century and a half, from 1543, the year of publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1687, what is given to print the book by Isaac Newton (1642-1727) Philosophiae naturalis Principia Mathematica. The decisive moment of this process occurs around twenty years 1620-1640: to date, in fact, even in Italy the conditions are a direct participation in the most advanced European culture, as well as beyond that period started a being clear exclusion from the intellectual context. The interest generated by Galileo Galilei around the study of natural phenomena, a concern which he led through its discoveries and its intellectual affair (the controversy, the processes, the final abjuration), affecting all fields of knowledge: in this context has altered the role and function of the scientist that the same "image of science." Although the new science is linked to, previous experience (first, humanism and naturalism of the Four-sixteenth century), the basis of this revolution is a completely original factor that constituted the essential driving force: the experimental method . In fact, while in the ancient world and throughout the Middle Ages the mechanisms of knowledge were based on the "principle of authority", which placed the interpretation given by the great thinkers of the world (primarily from Aristotle) \u200b\u200band Sacred Scripture as unquestionable truth, in the seventeenth century began to assert a new way to analyze reality, in which observation and experience replace the uncritical acceptance of authority "means the natural philosopher no longer passively accept what is suggested by his predecessors, but he wants to prove the validity of their results, and, if necessary, modify, correct or alternative hypotheses and therefore does not recognize any relationship other than that of experimental verification. This produced some new logic consequences: first, to question, subjecting them to try the experiment, the truths expressed by the two largest sources of authority: political power and religious power, the second of the freedom of science and scientists from all forms of external influences. Both these positions were immediately perceived as extremely dangerous for power, and then persecuted with great decision by the repressive structures that had come through the consolidation of absolutism and the Counter. The struggle for the conquest of scientific freedom becomes the freedom struggle in toto, so that its characters cross the boundaries of the history of science and to fit among the builders of modern civilization understood as a whole. The phenomenon of the scientific revolution was the international dimension and leading figures from across Europe: the Polish Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) - cosmologist that the heliocentric theory was the precursor of the new era - the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and the German Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) - who developed the insights - English Isaac Newton (1642-1727) - with which physics, astronomy and cosmology are merged into a general system for many aspects still valid today. In the field of mathematical studies, contributions must be of exceptional importance to the French Renò Descartes (Descartes, 1596-1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), and Germany's Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716). A decisive enrichment of knowledge derived from physiological and anatomical studies of Andreas Vesalius Flemish (1514-1564) and Italian Marcello Malpighi (1627-1694). But as far as Italy is concerned, there is no doubt that the most important figure is that of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), astronomer, physicist, mathematician, philosopher and prose writer for the great elegance of style and mastery of language.
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