ABSTRACT
Giordano Bruno entered Naples in 1562, at the age of 14. Three years later, at 17, he began his novitiate at the Dominican convent of San Domenico Maggiore, where he would eventually also enrol at the Dominican university in 1572, be ordained priest in 1573 and take a degree as lector in July of 1575.1 All told, Bruno would spend more than 14 years in Naples or its close environs before he fled northward in 1576. What he saw there, he saw as a young man; he left at the age of 28. Much of what he read in Naples he read with a student’s eagerness or quick disgust. What he experienced there had the indelible vividness of formative experience, as we know from his Candelaio (1582), published in Paris at six years’ remove but unmistakably set amid the picaresque street life of Naples. The mature writer of the 1580s must have differed significantly from his younger Neapolitan self, but the grown man is all we now know of Giordano Bruno.
