Stephanie Merritt

Too close to the sun

The villain of Alberto Martínez’s Burned Alive is Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who sentenced Bruno and banned Galileo’s heliocentric theories

issue 28 July 2018

  • Burned Alive: Giordano Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition

    Alberto A. Martínez

    Reaktion Books, pp. 352

If you go to the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February every year, you’ll find yourself surrounded by an eclectic crowd of atheists, free-thinkers, Catholic reformers, anarchists, mystics, students, scientists and poets all jostling to lay tributes before the statue of the hooded Dominican friar whose shadowed face stares inscrutably towards the Vatican.

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