The distinguished professor of the history of science, Prof. A. Rupert Hall, puts himself (pleonastically) the question, "Why now, now rather than earlier or later?", and, "Why here rather than there?": and considers that he's resolved those puzzles by declaring that"… the problem of how a certain event comes to pass may be simply the inverse of its not coming to pass", and then suggesting that"… the scientific revolution of the beginning of our modern epoch might even never have happened."
No: this seems to me an over-simplifying hypothesis.
During the years immediately preceding the publication of the first edition of  "Pure Heresy" (under the title: "The Path of the Sun" - "La via del sole" - Edis, 1996) I had thrown myself body and soul into the study of the History of Science, a fundamental part of the history of mankind, because it inevitably leads to some account of the conflict between Reason and Religion… a conflict that has so deeply scarred the destiny of humanity. I write this very, revised prefatory note for the new edition of "Pure Heresy" (Eresia pura), for the series called Eretica Speciale from Stampa Alternativa, there is an onjoing exhibition at the Archaeological Museum of Naples entitled "Eureka! - The genius of antiquity". The journalists who have reported this event, in abnegation of their critical faculties, have echoed the words of our minister for the cultural inheritance, Rocco Buttiglione, who write in the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition that "…the great Library of Alexandria disappeared", and that indeed "… in that era there was effected a fundamental scientific revolution", but that later, "… that era came to an end, for reasons that are still uncertain, and for which we are unlikely to find a single and satisfactory answer."

I have devoted a good part of my life to trying to explain these (supposedly) still uncertain reasons, availing myself of works such as "La rivoluzione dimenticata - il pensiero scientifico greco e la scienza moderna" (The forgotten revolution - Greek scientific thought and modern science), of Professor Lucio Russo, professor of the calculus of probability of the University of Rome; a work that demonstrates in an indisputable manner to what heights the scientific revolution begun by the Greeks had reached already 2400 years ago, in the 4th century B.C. - a revolution that went on in that crucible of scientific thought that was the school of Alexandria, over an arc of time that lasted for seven centuries.
And I have found one single, more than provisionally convincing answer… fully and minutely documented in my historical trilogy ("Ipazia scienziata alessandrina" - Hypatia, scientist of Alexandria, "Eresia pura" - Pure Heresy, and "Roghi fatui" - Futile Bonfires), in which I tell how the course of human philosophical and scientific thought was halted by the iniquitous alliance (as Gibbon calls it) between the dying Roman Empire and the newly-born Catholic Church, that culminated in the years 415 A.D. with the liquidation of the Alexandrian scientist Hypatia and of all her school: in that year began the reign of Christian obscurantism that deprived the human race of more than 1200 years of progress. Eight centuries after the murder of Hypatia, another, obscure scientist tried to make known "the keys of knowledge" to the world, extracting them from the bloodstained dust of libraries: Giordano Nemorario, forerunner of Leonardo da Vinci.
Then the cardinal Nicola Cusano, the craftsman Gutenberg, the astronomer Copernicus, the heretic Giordano Bruno and the father of modern science Galileo Galilei - amidst autos-da-fé, poisonings, and secret meetings of which little is known - were involved in a common story and shared a common passion: the discovery and the diffusion of Knowledge.
This is the central thread of these three historical novels: a new reading of the struggle between Science and Religion. A struggle with no holds barred between the Catholic Church and those whose lives were devoted to the diffusion of understanding and to providing the human race with a means of liberation.