By day, it is a chaotic, delighful fruit and vegetable market, filled with locals doing daily food shopping. Around the square are mostly trattoria, with a butcher and baker as well. The baker is busy, famous for their pizza bianco. Mellissa describes the locals gathering like crows to get their slice as it comes out of the oven. We gathered today, Australian crows, and it was good.
By night, this is a place of bars and restaurants, with diners and youngsters gathering to nosh, meet and drink.
In the centre of the square is a large statue of a hooded man, about twice life size. He is cloaked and his face is mostly concealed. He makes a brooding, dark figure amongst the day-time fruiterers and shoppers and the night-time revellers. His name is Giordano Bruno and he was burnt at the stake in this square in 1600.
Bruno was a philosopher, who came to believe that the earth was not the centre of the universe. Influenced by new scientific thinking, he accepted ideas about a solar system and the notion that the stars were suns like ours.
These free thoughts about the universe were appalling ideas to the church, who held that the earth was created by god and was the centre of the universe. The church tried Bruno for heresy and found him guilty. The state burnt him at the stake.
Assertive atheism is on the rise in the west. Dawkins and Hitchens have published best sellers that argue that there is no god. Their books are called 'The God Delusion' and 'God is not great'. They reason that religion is bad, not benign and that we should get on with a pragmatic, humanistic way of life.
Four hundred years ago, these infammable ideas would have been deadly for Dawkins and Hitchens. Today, they have both received death threats from flaky zealots, but neither the church nor the state have proposed burning them at the stake. This I call progress.
When Bruno was murdered by the church because he was fatally seduced by the truth, there was much that people did not know. That germs caused disease, weather was predictable, fertility could be controlled, the earth was round and part of a solar system and universe. The unknown world is much, much smaller now.
No comments:
Post a Comment