The members of the learned circle of friends stimulated the boys, tutoring and mentoring them, under the strict guidance of their father.

More aware of their social position than the idea that his sons could have professions in science, Nardo Antonio raised the boys more as gentlemen than as scholars.

The training gave della Porta, at least earlier in his life, a taste for the finer aspects of privileged living.

[6]Della Porta invented a method which allowed him to write secret messages on the inside of eggs.

Della Porta wrote messages on the eggshell using a mixture made of plant pigments and alum.

In 1586 della Porta published a work on physiognomy, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII (1586).

This influenced the Swiss eighteenth-century pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater as well as the 19th-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso.

Della Porta wrote extensively on a wide spectrum of subjects throughout his life – for instance, an agricultural encyclopedia entitled "Villa" as well as works on meteorology, optics, and astronomy.

In 1589, on the eve of the early modern Scientific Revolution, della Porta became the first person to attack in print, on experimental grounds, the ancient assertion that garlic could disempower magnets.

Della Porta was the founder of a scientific society called the Academia Secretorum Naturae (Accademia dei Segreti).

[9][10] His interest in a variety of disciplines resulted in the technological advances of the following: agriculture, hydraulics, Military Engineering, instruments, and pharmacology.

He was forced to disband his Academia Secretorum Naturae, and in 1592 his philosophical works were prohibited from further publication by the Church; the ban was lifted in 1598.

Porta's involvement with the Inquisition puzzles historians due to his active participation in charitable Jesuit works by 1585.

Indeed, the masks of the improvised theatre evolved as stylised versions of recurring character types in written comedies.

One of Della Porta's most notable stock characters was the parasito or parassita, a gluttonous trickster whose lack of moral scruples enabled him to pull off stunts that initially might risk bringing the plot crashing down, but ended up winning the day in unexpected ways.