During the Cinquecento and due to a host of writers including Ariosto and Tasso Renaissance Ferrara was the literary capital of Italian letters along with Florence, whereas the language of papal Rome was humanist Latin.

[3] Debarred by his superiors because of his manifest literary talents from the missions in the Indies he would later describe, he attained high distinction in science and letters.

[4] Under Jesuit scientists Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Niccolo Zucchi the young Bartoli, together with his younger contemporary Francesco Maria Grimaldi was involved in noteworthy experiments and discoveries of the planetary heavens.

In his thirties he was an esteemed preacher delivering the Lenten sermons at the principal Jesuits churches of Italy including Ferrara, Genoa, Florence and Rome.

During the process of her conversion to Roman Catholicism at the hands of the Jesuits in the 1650s Christina, Queen of Sweden specifically requested a copy of this celebrated work be sent to her in Stockholm.

[7] Because of his growing fame his superiors put an end to his decade as an itinerant preacher and brought him permanently to the order's headquarters in Rome.

The remarkable success of Bartoli's literary debut coincided with the triumph of the High Baroque in Rome and it serves as a testament to the formative role of the Italian Jesuits as cultural entrepreneurs meditating between the sacred and the profane elements of the age.

As such Bartoli represents the shift from the preceding Latin humanist historiography of Niccolò Orlandini and Francesco Sacchini to the illustrious Jesuit prose tradition he established in Italian when he undertook the official history of the first century of the Society of Jesus (1540).

Indefatigible in his final years Bartoli produced 4 Jesuit biographies and three scientific treatises on pressure, sound, coagulation.