CHAPTER I

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE — BOYHOOD
A TRAVELLER, curious to try the local line which runs eastward from Naples, after journeying a few meandering miles through a generous and beautiful country-side, will find his train halting at the little city of Nola. Should he descend, he would not come across anything strikingly picturesque or architecturally memorable. There are few vestiges of the remote past ; even the mediaeval cathedral is a restoration. On an eminence, a ruined fortress still dominates Campagna Felice — " the happy fields " — as the inhabitants call their plain ; and, as of old time, the vine- yards are lavish in the production of " mangiaguerra," a thick black wine. The sky is very lucid; the air sweet and soft; the eye may range over the rich and varied plain to Monte Somma (which hides Vesuvius) and to other guardian hills.
Outside the walls of Nola there stood in the mid i6th century. Cicala, a hamlet of "four or five houses, none of them too imposing ; " ^ and here, in 1 548,^ there was born to a soldier in the service of the Spanish masters of Naples, one Gioan Bruno and his wife, a man child. The
* Brano, G ; Spaccio delta bestia trionfante, Dial. I. iij.
' Berti, D ; G. B. da Nola, sua vita e sua dottrina, 1889, App., Doc. vij. — Auvray, L ; Mem. d. I. Soc. d. Phisioire de Paris et de Pile de France, t. xxvij,p. 288 sgq., sub 7th December.
A
2 GIORDANO BRUNO
infant was destined to become a precursor of modern science and philosophy, to cast a search-light into dark places and bring forth hidden things ; it was his fate to wander, an excommunicated and fugitive priest, through many lands, impelled, heedless of self, partly by a restless nature but chiefly because of a certain missionary zeal for truth and desire to set the intellect free from the fetters of authority; he was to endure strange vicissitudes in penury, years of solitary suffering at the hands of the Inquisition because he claimed "philosophic freedom in thought and speech," and, finally, to pass from its cruel dungeons " a flame to the flames." He was born in the very year which saw an outbreak at Naples against a contemplated introduction of the Spanish Inquisition.
Bruno tells us that his mother's name was Fraulissa.^ She was of a family called Savolini or Saulini. Probably Fiorentino * was right in connecting her singular baptismal name with German mercenaries, whose Italian wives may very well have been so called ; and certainly some of the multitude of mercenary troops drawn from beyond the Alps had settled in the neighbourhood.* As to the social status of the Bruni and many similar problems, much has been conjectured and no certainty achieved. It would seem probable that the family was very far from being wealthy, but had some claim to gentility.* The Bruni may have been a branch of the noble family of that name at Asti.
' Beirti, D ; loc. cit.
^ Fiorentino, F ; Dialoghi Morali di G. B. Giom. Napol., N.S. \%Z%,fasc. 19, /. 44. Great circumspection is required in regard to this paper. In consulting the Registers, Fiorentino somehow con- trived to confound the year 1545 with the year 1563 ! It should be read side by side with the monograph Bruno e Nola by Signor