Rome, Italy, February 17, 1600.

The day after Ash Wednesday, and Rome had a different kind of penance in mind.

A mule carried a naked man through the narrow streets toward the Campo de Fiore,

the old market square near the spot where

Julius Caesar had been murdered 16 centuries earlier. The man on the mule was Giordano Bruno, philosopher,

poet, former Dominican friar, and, as of nine days ago, a condemned heretic. The Inquisition

had stripped him of everything, his priesthood, his Dominican

scapular, his habit, his dignity. They had dressed him in the clothes of a common layman

before handing him over to the secular authorities. Now they had taken the clothes, too. A leather

bridle had been fastened across his mouth. The gag was not a standard feature of Roman executions.

The Inquisition had ordered it specifically for Bruno, to prevent him from shouting heresies to the

crowd. The church had spent eight years trying to shut this man up. Even at the stake, they were not

confident they had succeeded. The square was full.

Vendors had pushed their carts aside to make room for the pyre. A mound of firewood,

charcoal, kindling, and pitch stacked in the center of the piazza. Members of the company of

San Giovanni Decolato, a lay brotherhood dedicated to comforting the condemned, sang litanies as Bruno was led to the pile.

They sang for his soul. Bruno did not appear interested. When they tied him to the stake,

a friar stepped forward and held a crucifix to his face. Bruno turned his head away. That small

act of defiance, the turning of the head, would be the last thing anybody remembered

clearly. The rest was fire. The road to that pyre had been 34 years in the making, and it started

in a monastery in Naples. Filippo Bruno entered the Dominican order in 1565 at 17. He took the name

Giordano and proved himself brilliant, restless, and utterly

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