• Campo di Fiori in the early morning
  • Campo di Fiori in the early morning
  • Giordano Bruno was killed here in 1600
  • His hooded figure faces the Vatican

Campo di Fiori

Campo di Fiori means field of flowers or flower court in Italian. The name comes from the middle ages when this square was a meadow and it had stuck as this area is a flower and spice market on Sundays.

This was a quite important square during the middle ages, being on the route between St. Peter's and St. John the Lateran. The Vatican, which is not too far away, used to place their notices here, papal bulls and the like and this was where they used to execute people who fell in to disfavor of the church such as the man in the centre of the square.

Giordano Bruno was a philosopher, mathematician and contemporary of Galileo. He was born in 1548 in Nola, not too far from Pompeii and became a priest in his twenties. He was influenced by Copernicus who said the Earth went around the sun and proved it. The church knew it did but they could not contravene the Bible.

Bruno believed the universe was constantly expanding and was the first man to suggest it.
He believed there was life on other planets. Star Trek and Star Wars owe their concepts to him. His ideas got him excommunicated by the church, so he went to Geneva in Switzerland and joined the Calvinists or Presbyterians. He worked as a maths professor but was excommunicated by the Calvinists for slandering a colleague. So he got annoyed at their intransigence and left.

He lived in England for a while with the Episcopalians and later moved to Germany, teaching about Aristotle in Wittenberg where Luther started the Protestant Reformation. He had to become a Lutheran to teach there and he was eventually excommunicated for his dissenting opinions. He eventually returned to Venice and gave private lessons to a noble’s son. This son denounced him to the inquisition and he was arrested and tried for heresy. Bruno was declared a heretic, handed over to secular authorities on February 8 1600. At his trial he listened to the verdict on his knees, then stood up and said: "Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it." He was imprisoned in Castel St. Angelo for a month and was then brought to here, his tongue in a gag, tied to a pole naked and burned at the stake, on February 17, 1600.

Over two hundred years later in 1889, the freemasons erected this statue here in his honor.
At that time in Rome, Italy had just become a unified country and they had taken Rome from the Vatican by force so there was a lot of anti-papal feeling still left. The statue faces Vatican in defiance of them. On the panels beneath him there are pictures from his life depicting his trial and execution.

Nowadays this square is one of Rome’s hot night spots for young people. It is a great square to have dinner or have a beer.
If you want you can: