ABSTRACT
This epilogue suggests that the interpretation of the trial offered in the book can shed new light on the extreme and perhaps best known phrase uttered by Bruno shortly before his burning (“Perhaps it is with greater fear that you pronounce the sentence against me, than what I feel in receiving it”). Once he had ascertained that the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation was wholly unsuited to taking the reins of continental religious pacification as he had hoped, nothing remained for Bruno but to bear witness, with his own personal sacrifice, to the end of an era of grand hopes and ideals. With his defiant choice to be burned alive at the stake Giordano Bruno consigned to history his bitter, extreme protest against a Rome, and an Italy, that did not know how to – or want to – remain central in the fate of the world.
