The weather yesterday morning was perfect, like something out of a tourist pamphlet: clear, warm, with a bright blue sky. I grabbed my shopping bag and headed out to Campo di Fiori to find vegetables and bread. The campo is a small piazza ringed with food shops and restaurants that in the morning is given over to food vendors and in the evening to a lively nightlife. It’s a short walk from the apartment down narrow cobblestone streets lined with specialty shops and a pizzeria that claims to serve only organic food. When I first started going there ten or so years ago, the square was full of food and flower vendors. Now booths with tourist stuff have crowded them out so only about a third of the space sells anything you’d actually want.
The first thing I see on entering the square is this cute guy with a machine gun.
And then an assortment of food.
Ever wonder how your salad greens get prewashed?
Campo di Fiori has a special historic distinction: it’s where the Popes burned their heretics, a heretic being anyone they didn’t agree with or who rocked the church’s boat. Giordano Bruno, the second most famous heretic of all time (Jeanne d’Arc presumably being the most famous) was burned alive there on Ash Wednesday, February 17, 1600. Bruno started out as a Dominican priest but broke with the church when he disagreed with various of its tenets. To escape the Pope’s vengeance, he traveled to all the great universities of the time in Germany, France, and England to expound his theories where he was welcomed at first and then kicked out when he failed to agree with whatever the current doctrine was. I’m no expert, but as nearly as I can tell, his main crime was that he disagreed with Aristotle: he believed the universe was infinite and wouldn’t stop talking about it. Mainly, he pissed off the church hierarchy, especially the Pope, and wouldn’t recant his beliefs. Back then, you didn’t mess with the Pope. One of the crimes he was accused of was saying that the human soul could transmigrate into beasts. (What, you’re thinking?) I read between those lines that he was taunting the guys who were accusing him by suggesting that they might be reincarnated as cockroaches. He also dabbled in magic.
His famous last words to the Cardinals who sentenced him were, “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”
Today Romans and most of the world honor him as a great thinker, and people still put flowers on the spot where he died.
I can’t figure out whether the Syndicate of Rome is a political party or a sports organization. Anyone know?
This one is from a union of agnostics.
In other news, Italian eggplants don’t taste anything like the ones we get in the States, none of that characteristic bitterness I like. They also look funny.
And it’s possible to have an artichoke sandwich for breakfast.
