, a celebrated professor of astronomy and natural history at Padua,
, a celebrated professor of astronomy and natural history at Padua, was born in
1650, of a noble family, at Tripani in Sicily. He entered
the third order of St. Francis; taught mathematics at Messina, and theology at Rome, where he had taken a doctor’s’
degree in the college della Sapienza. Francis II. duke of
Modena made him professor of philosophy and geometry
in his capital; but he gave up that situation to go to Venice, where he quitted the Franciscan habit in 1693, by
permission of the pope, and took that of a secular priest.
He was afterwards appointed professor of astronomy and
physic in the university of Padua, and died at Naples, from
a second attack of an apoplexy, January 2, 1718. Fardella had a lively genius and fertile imagination, but became 50 absent, by a habit of profound thought, that he
sometimes appeared to have lost his senses. He left sereral works on literature, philosophy, and mathematics;
some in Latin, others in Italian. The principal are, “Universae Philosophise Systema,
” Venice, 16iU, 12mo; “Universae Usualis Mathematics Theoria,
” 12mo; “Animoe
humanae Natura ab Augustino detecta,
”