Paolo De Vita
Paolo De Vita (born 29 June 1957) is an Italian film and television actor.
Born in Bari, he debuted on television in 1984 with the TV series Aeroporto internazionale (International Airport), followed by the 1985 miniseries Un siciliano in Sicilia (A Sicilian in Sicily) directed by Pino Passalacqua. He also appeared in Don Matteo and the 2007 television series Nebbie e delitti (Killings and Mists). In 2011 he was part of the cast of the television series R.I.S. Roma 2 - Delitti imperfetti (RIS Rome 2 - Imperfect Crimes) directed by Francis Micciche.
De Vita has also had a substantial career in film, an early role being in the neo-realist film Il giudice ragazzino (The Boy Judge) in 1994. In 2001 he appeared in Nanni Moretti's La stanza del figlio (The Son's Room). He has since moved into English language cinema, playing Edward de Vere's loyal Italian retainer, in the Roland Emmerich film Anonymous (2011).
Filmography
Cinema
De vita libri tres
The De vita libri tres or Three Books on Life was written in the years 1480–1489 by Italian Platonist Marsilio Ficino. It was first circulated in manuscript form and then published on December 3, 1489. It was constantly in print through the middle of the seventeenth century.
De vita is a curious amalgam of philosophy, medicine, "natural magic" and astrology, and is possibly the first book ever written about the health of the intellectual and its peculiar concerns. Alongside passages explaining the immortality and divine source and nature of the soul, there are astrological charts and remedies, speeches from various Greek gods arguing with one another, philosophical digressions, medieval prescriptions for various ills, attempts at reconciling the Neoplatonism of Plotinus with Christian scripture, and magical remedies and talismans.
Ficino was one of the major philosophical voices of the Italian Renaissance, but he was also a physician, and the son of a physician. De vita is an example of the medical thinking of the early Renaissance, steeped in Galen and Hippocrates and the theory of the four humors and their attendant Aristotelian qualities (e.g., hot, cold, moist,dry), but also beginning to align this viewpoint with the awakening sense of the archetypal significance of the pagan gods, derived from the first exposure in the West for many centuries to the dialogues of Plato and to the Hermetica. (Ficino was the first translator of Plato into Latin.)
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