 Circumstances could scarcely have been more propitious for heterodox Renaissance thinkers such as Telesio, Campanella, Galileo Galilei and, above all, Bruno. For many Italians, his philosophy, heroic defiance of ecclesiastical authority and execution exemplified the long struggle to free philosophy from the trammels of revealed religion. Popular versions of Bruno’s life and death likened him to Socrates, Christ or, nearer home, martyrs of the Risorgimento. This adulation found its most visible expression in the monumental bronze statue, designed by the sculptor Ettore Ferrari, a mason and later Grand Master of the masonic lodge, the Grande Oriente d’Italia, located in Rome. In 1889, in the face of tooth-and-nail opposition from the Vatican, the statue was erected, glaring directly towards the Holy See, on the very spot in the Campo dei Fiori where Bruno was believed to have been burned at the stake. For nineteenth-century Italian intellectuals such as Vincenzo Gioberti, Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco Fiorentino, he was, as he had been for Enlightenment thinkers, a “Spinozist” in many respects or more broadly, a secular humanist, someone who had liberated the human spirit from the suffocating confines of religious orthodoxy and paved the way for modern philosophy and natural science. Catholic apologists rose to the Church’s defence, belittling this “Brunomania”, as they dubbed it, and on occasion denying that Bruno had been executed. Amid the turmoil, Bertrando Spaventa, Felice Tocco, Francesco Fiorentino and other Italian scholars produced critical editions of Bruno’s Latin and Italian works or wrote studies on them, thereby laying the foundations of modern Bruno scholarship and appreciation of him as a philosopher. During the twentieth century Bruno enjoyed a reputation among orthodox historians of the Soviet Union as the first modern genius of a materialist philosophy; those who, like Lev Karsavin, presented a philosophically and historically contextualized interpretation of his thought, were persecuted for their “bourgeiois” views. Comparatively recent attempts to establish magic or mnemotechnics as the key to his philosophy such as those of Frances Yates, valuable though they remain for incidental details and insights, obscure Bruno’s stated intention to articulate a “new philosophy”, tout court.