In Rome on the Campo di Fiori
Baskets of olives and lemons,
Cobbles spattered with wine
And the wreckage of flowers.
-- Czeslaw Milosz
For years, all I knew about the Campo de' Fiori was that it contained a statue of Giordano Bruno. My SO was writing his doctoral dissertation on Bruno, you see, which naturally gave him an interest in images of the philosopher.
As it happens, not many images of Bruno exist, and the one in the Campo is by far the coolest: a looming, brooding bronze of a cloaked figure, a mage straight out of a fantasy novel, clutching an immense book and taking an ominous step forward. Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy on that very spot in the year 1600... the moment that marked the beginning of modernity, or so some say. No doubt you've heard a lot of nonsense about how Bruno was killed by the big bad Catholic Church because he was a "scientist," and how he was a "martyr for freethinkery" and so on. Whatever. All I cared about was that the statue is amazing and eerie and a little unexpected (peek under the hood: why does an ex-monk from Nola wear a Gaulish moustache, for one thing?). My SO was looking forward to the day when he could see it in person.
He has not yet had that chance -- we're working on fixing that -- but this year I had the opportunity to spend some time in Rome, and made a pilgrimage on his behalf. Ignorant creature that I was, I didn't even know what the Campo was, exactly. I knew the name translated as field of flowers. I'd guessed that it wasn't literally a field, since I could tell from photographs that the Bruno statue was surrounded by buildings. But other than that, I was ready for anything.
Anything, that is, except a fruit market.
The Campo is a piazza -- an open square -- surrounded by some of the trendiest Renaissance real estate in Rome. It's a stone's throw from the Palazzo Farnese, the Palazzo del Monte di Pietà, and the Palazzo Spada, lovely baroque palaces from which, half a millennium ago, wealthy families could watch papal processions go by. But today, the Campo is not a site for papal processions.
By day, it really is a fruit market -- and an all-kinds-of-other-things market too. Vendors set up tents (or sometimes just blankets) under the dark gaze of Bruno, where they sell fresh food and cut flowers, and sometimes other odds and ends, too -- books, tools, shoes, small appliances, sunglasses. By night, the Campo transforms into a place for parties: university students, artists, foreigners, and anyone else who is looking for a good time (which is to say, just about any Roman you meet) will play music, dance, flirt, and get drunk in the Campo until the small hours of the morning.
I really wonder what Giordano thinks of all this. It seems so strange that the site of a heresy trial and a gruesome execution could be a place of such joy today.
The name of the piazza can be spelled numerous ways: Campo dei Fiori, Campo de' Fiori, Campo di Fiori. Try a Google image search on any one of those phrases, then tell me what you think Bruno is thinking.
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