In Rome, as in Florence, Renaissance academies aimed to reproduce the traditions of the Academy of Plato, promoting the cultivation of philosophy in the Ancient Greek sense of "love of wisdom", especially characterized by Renaissance Platonism and its neoplatonic ideas.
The 16th century saw at Rome a great increase of literary and aesthetic circles or 'academies', more or less inspired by the Renaissance, all of which assumed, as was the fashion, odd and fantastic names.