This volume of the Cabinet Cyclopædia brings together vivid biographical portraits of Italy's great minds, beginning with Galileo Galilei, the brilliant and embattled founder of modern science. From his youth in Pisa, where music, art, and mechanics first stirred his imagination, Galileo moves from medical study to geometry, Euclid, and Archimedes, rejecting Aristotelian authority in favor of experiment and observation. His challenge to falling-body theory, his experiments at Pisa, his professorship at Padua, and his growing fame through studies of magnetism, the "new star," and the telescope reveal a thinker who transformed the heavens while enduring opposition, ridicule, and hardship. The volume then turns to Metastasio, whose poetic gift emerges through the encouragement of Marianna Bulgarelli and whose career rises from disappointment in Rome to triumph in Vienna as court poet. His celebrated operas, loyal friendships, and reflective letters portray an artist of grace, gratitude, and self-doubt, deeply devoted to his craft and to the search for truth amid changing tastes and fortunes. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.