Ferdinando Cesarini

Born in Rome in a noble family. Brother of the better-known Virginio Cesarini (1596–1624) to whom Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) addressed Il Saggiatore [The Assayer] (Rome, 1623) in the form of a letter. Ferdinando Cesarini, as a referendarius utriusque signaturae and patron, corresponded with Benedetto Castelli (1577/8-1643), who described the Galilean thermoscope to him in a letter of September 20, 1638.^[2]

Father Castelli also invited him to spread the Discorso sulla calamita [Discourse on the loadstone], also dedicated to Cesarini, within a limited circle of "trust" people.^[3] Fundamental was the ascending of Cesarini, who pushed Castelli to turn his thoughts around the most "noble fields of the philosophizing".^[4]

Cesarini also had contacts with Giovanni Ciampoli, who presented him in a poem^[5] and with whom, in the late nineteenth century, he was counted among the prelates of his era inclined "to promote the progress of science".^[6]

As a poet he mostly distinguished himself in the satirical poetry;^[7] he was also the author of a Latin oration in memory of St. Aloysius Gonzaga that he declaimed, fifteen, in the presence of several cardinals,^[8] and of a Latin poem, recited in Jesuits' Roman College, for the election of the Emperor Ferdinand II.^[9][10]

Cesarini died at age forty-two, leaving as his executor and heir Cardinal Federico Sforza.^[11]

• De beato Aloysio Gonzaga oratio Romae habita ab illustriss. Ferdinando Caesarini ducis fratre (1618)
• Gratulatio Ferdinando Cæsari dicta a Ferdinando Cæsarini Ducis fratre in Collegio Romano Soci. Iesu (1619)