Campo dei Fiori is a biography: the biography of the statue dedicated to Giordano Bruno in the late 19th century in the famous Roman square. A monument immediately considered the supreme symbol of freedom or the worst of curses, redemption or shame. But Campo dei Fiori is also a book about Italy, the many weaknesses of the secular front and the stubborn closure to any idea of modernity present in the Catholic Church at the time. It is a compelling reconstruction of a political struggle that had many protagonists: the Roman student movement, Francesco Crispi and Freemasonry, Ettore Ferrari and Giovanni Bovio, Pope Leo XIII and the Jesuits of “Civiltà Cattolica,” Francesco De Sanctis, Antonio Labriola, Giuseppe Garibaldi. And also a certain Armand Lévy, by profession revolutionary, former Communard, exile, Jew and socialist, unknown to most, but who played a decisive role in the preparatory phase of the monument. 

It was a real secular and anticlerical battle: one of the few fought in Italy and one that it is right not to forget. Not so much to celebrate it as to know it, indeed perhaps it is better to say to decipher it: through understanding a clash that was extremely violent and the attempts made to defuse it, as well as the alliances and opportunisms that from time to time were put in place to win the game or to postpone it forever. 

Winner of the Viareggio Rèpaci Prize for Non-Fiction