This was a decisive experience in his education: his tutor not only guided him toward knowledge of the classics, but also exposed him to the methods and perspectives of “new science”; Caloprese had returned to Calabria from Naples, where he had frequented the Accademia degli Investiganti (Academy of Investigators), which diffused the ideas of Galileo, Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi throughout southern Italy.

In 1680 Gravina moved to Naples to undertake legal studies, during which he turned particularly to the great humanists of the sixteenth century, both jurists and scholars.

At the same time he perfected himself in Greek at the school of Gregorio Messere He quickly entered into the most forward-thinking cultural circles of the capital, represented in the sphere of law by the followers of Francesco D'Andrea.

[1] In Rome, which had now become his base, he composed between 1692 and 1696 numerous writings that were literary in nature or characterized either by historical scholarship or by moral or aesthetic criticism, and that were for the most part united in the various Opuscula, dedicated to Innocent XII (1696).

In 1701 Gravina published the first draft of his principal work, Originum juris civilis libri tres, which was completed in 1704, appeared in a definitive edition in Leipzig in 1708, and has been reprinted several times.

Gravina was the author of a number of works of great erudition, the principal being his Origines juris civilis, completed in 3 vols (1713) and his De Romano imperio (1712).

Gravina seeks to pioneer poetics as a science deduced from rational first principles and conceives poetry itself as a rudimentary and imperfect form of cognition through which philosophical truth is transmitted by means of image and emotion.