You're in Campo de' Fiori — Field of Flowers. In the mornings it's a market, all produce and cut flowers and fish on ice, and in the evenings it fills up with people drinking. It's one of the most pleasant squares in Rome. And right in the middle of it stands a tall bronze statue of a man in a hooded robe, head bowed, looking genuinely furious. Nobody selling artichokes underneath him seems to notice.
That's Giordano Bruno, and this cheerful little square is where they burned him alive.
Bruno was a philosopher and former friar with an idea that was centuries ahead of its time. He looked at the night sky and said the stars are other suns, and those suns have their own planets, and those planets probably have their own life. An infinite universe with no center and no edge. The Church considered this heresy of the most dangerous kind, and after years in the Inquisition's cells, they marched him out here, in the year sixteen hundred, and burned him at the stake.
Before they lit the fire
, they clamped his tongue so he could not address the crowd. They were that afraid of what he might say. His ashes went into the Tiber.
Bruno wasn't the only one, either. For a couple of centuries this square was one of Rome's regular execution grounds — hangings and burnings staged in the open as a public lesson. And look around: for Rome, something is missing. There's no church on this piazza.
