Science in ancient Rome was about engineering, ship building, architecture, medicine, plant life, city planning which included transportation and roads, water, baths and sewers, map making, candles, astronomy and esoteric sciences such as astrology and alchemy. Scientific discovery often reflected in art and poetry - nature.

A new empirical science based more and more on controlled observation of the natural world emerged in Rome around 1600.

Michele Mercati, botanist and geologist, tried to make the papal metal collection a great center for the study of the earth and its minerals.

Michele Mercati (8 April 1541­25 June 1593) was a physician who was superintendent of the Vatican Botanical Garden under Popes Pius V, Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, and Clement VIII.Mercati was born in Rome, the son of Pietro Mercati, physician to Popes Pius V and Gregory XIII. He was educated at the University of Pisa, where he took degrees in medicine and philosophy.

Mercati was interested in natural history, mineralogy, palaeontology, medicine, and botany, and he produced a book on these subjects, the Metallotheca which was not published until 1717.

Amongst other things, Mercati collected prehistoric stone tools along with fossils and minerals. These, in conjunction with his classical education, and the growing Vatican Library collection of ethnographic artefacts from Asia and America, enabled Mercati to include in the Metallotheca one of the first accounts of the manufacture and use of polished stone axes, flint arrowheads, and stone blades.

David Clarke describes Mercati as "the archaeological counterpart of Cardano in mathematics, Vesalius in anatomy, Galileo in the physical sciences and Copernicus in astronomy."

The astronomical revolution begun by Copernicus found support in the Jesuits' Collegio Romano. The new scientific society Accademia dei Lincei ("academy of the lynx- eyed," so-called from the keenness of sight of its members) gave a powerful example of collective study of scientific problems, the beginning of something like modern laboratory work.

The Accademia dei Lincei, (literally the "Academy of the Lynxes", but also known as the Lincean Academy), is located at the Palazzo Corsini on the Via della Lungara in Rome, Italy. As the oldest Italian academy, it has been the official scientific academy of Italy since 1871. At its foundation in Rome 1603 by Federico Cesi, it was a locus for what was then the ongoing scientific revolution. It is named after the lynx, whose sharp vision was invoked symbolically as characteristic of those dedicated to science.

The academy replaced the first scientific community ever, the Academia Secretorum Naturae, that was closed due to Inquisition. It was founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi (1586-1630), an aristocrat from Umbria (the son of Duke of Acquasparta and a member of an important family from Rome) who was passionately interested in natural history, above all in botany.

When Cesi visited Naples, he met the polymath Giambattista della Porta, and founded a branch of Porta's academy in that city together with three of his friends, the Dutch physician Johannes Van Heeck (italianized to Giovanni Ecchio), and two fellow Umbrians, mathematician Francesco Stelluti and polymath Anastasio de Filiis.

Cesi and his friends took on the goal of understanding all of the natural sciences, an emphasis that set the Lincei apart from the host of 16th and 17th century Italian Academies, most of which were literary and antiquarian. Free experiment was Cesi's plan, respectful of tradition, but untrammeled by blind obedience to authority, even that of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which the new science was calling into question.

Porta joined the academy in 1610.The academy chose the name lynx because of the traditional belief that those cats have unusually sharp vision. Its symbols were both a lynx and an eagle, because they were famed for their sharp eyes.

The academy's motto, chosen by Cesi, was: "take care of small things if you want to obtain the greatest results."

Galileo was admitted to the group on December 25, 1611, and became its intellectual center. Being a member of the academy was an honour to him, because after being accepted as its member, he signed himself Galileo Galilei Linceo.

The academy published his works and supported him through his disputes with the Catholic Church.

Among the academy's early publications in the fields of astronomy, physics and botany were the study of sunspots and the famous Saggiatore of Galileo, and the Tesoro Messicano (Mexican Treasury) describing the flora, fauna, and drugs of the New World, which took decades of labor, down to 1651.

With this publication, the first, most famous phase of the Lincei was concluded. Cesi's own intense activity was cut short by his sudden death in 1630, scarcely 45 years of age.Another important member of the academy was Luca Valerio.

The Linceans produced an important collection of micrographs, or drawings made with the help of the newly invented microscope. After Cesi's death, the academy closed and the drawings were collected by Cassiano dal Pozzo, a Roman antiquarian, who sold them in 1763 to George III of the United Kingdom.

The drawings were discovered in Windsor Castle in 1986 by art historian David Freedberg.

In the 18th century the abbot Scarpellini attempted to revive an academy of "New Lincei", but it underwent a true revival only in 1847, when Pope Pius IX re-founded it as the Pontificia accademia dei Nuovi Lincei, the Pontifical Academy of New Lincei.

In 1874, Quintino Sella turned it into the Accademia Nazionale Reale dei Lincei, the Royal National Lincean Academy. This incarnation broadened its scope to include moral and humanistic sciences, and regained the high prestige associated with the original Lincean Academy. After the unification of Italy, the Piedmontese Quintino Sella infused new life into the Nuovo Lincei, reaffirming its ideals of secular science, but broadening its scope to include humanistic studies: history, philology, archeology, philosophy, economics and law, in two classes of Soci (Fellows). The modern Lincei have constituted a pantheon of European intellectuals: from Righi and Pacinotti to Fermi, from Pasteur to Roentgen and Einstein, from Mommsen to Wilamowitz, Comparetti, Croce, and Gentile.

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