On February 17, 1600, a man was stripped, his tongue clamped in a wooden vice, and burned alive in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno in Nola in 1548, was a Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer who imagined a universe with no center and no edge, filled with countless suns and planets, decades before the telescope. This episode traces how a boy from southern Italy became a wandering genius, a relentless provocateur, and a symbol of free thought.

We cover his famed art of memory and the memory wheels he demonstrated for Pope Pius V, the banned Erasmus books hidden in a monastery latrine, his flight in 1576, the fight he picked in Calvinist Geneva, royal patronage under Henry III, and his most fertile years in London, including the ship’s-mast argument for a moving Earth and the theory that he spied for Walsingham under the name Henry Fagot. Then comes his fatal return to Italy, Mocenigo’s betrayal, seven years in Roman prison, and the trial before Cardinal Bellarmine.

• How theology, not a telescope, led Bruno to shatter the closed snow-globe cosmos
• The Oxford debacle and George Abbot’s mockery
• What the Inquisition actually charged him with, from the Trinity to metempsychosis
• His defiant words to his judges and the ashes thrown into the Tiber
• Galileo’s recantation 16 years later, the 1889 statue, and the Vatican’s 2000 apology