 This European revival was the setting for Bruno’s rehabilitation in Italy. Hegel, Michelet and others had portrayed the period that we now know, thanks to Michelet, as the Renaissance and Reformation as the birthplace of modernity. This was manifest above all, though not exclusively, through the artistic, literary and philosophical achievements of the period, which had broken the Roman Catholic Church’s dominance in spiritual and cultural concerns. For many, the most conspicuous being Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), the honor for this rupture belonged principally to the Italians, “the first born among the sons of modern Europe” (pt 2, ch. 1). Sentiments of these kinds were welcome in Italy. Pride in its cultural achievements fed into the crescendo of nationalist fervour—the “Risorgimento”, leading eventually to the proclamation of Italy as an independent kingdom in 1861—and mounting hostility in some circles towards the Roman Catholic Church. The Church had been blamed for the peninsula’s political fragmentation and intellectual atrophy ever since the Counter-Reformation.