ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders the overall trial and the outline of its development, highlighting how Bruno decided to turn the tables after Celestino (it is possible to hypothesize) was released from the prisons of the Holy Office despite having been officially sent to burn at the stake. It is as if the philosopher finally understood that the leaders of Catholicism in the age of the Counter-Reformation could no longer be the Church that he, from the perspective of an intellectual exile in Protestant Europe, thought they could still be: the primary engine of a religious pacification of the continent. The logic of political-religious opposition and the doctrinal and hierarchical hardening of the papacy after 1542, the failure of the dialogue with the Protestant world, the devastating inquisitorial trials, and the definitive closures sanctioned by the pontificates of Paul IV and Pius V all combined to deny any historical space to the grandiose and ambitious scenario conceived of by Giordano Bruno; for which he can also be counted among the great European thinkers of the early modern era.
