In 1548, at a stormy period of the history of Italy, Bruno was born in the township of Nola, lying within the kingdom of Naples, which at that time was under Spanish rule. His father, Giovanni, was a soldier, probably of good family, and in deference, it may be supposed, to the King of Spain, the son was named Filippo; the more famous name of Giordano was only assumed when he entered a religious order. Through his mother, Fraulissa Savolina, a German or Saxon origin has been claimed for Bruno; there were several inhabitants of Teutonic name in the village of his birth--suggesting a settlement of _Landknechts_,--and the name, Fraulissa, has a German ring;[1] but Bruno himself nowhere in the addresses or works published in Germany makes any hint of his own connection with the race, while the name was probably a generic term for the wife of a soldier, borrowed from the Swiss or German men-at-arms.[2] [Sidenote: Nola.] Their home was on the lower slopes of Mount Cicala, which rises above Nola, and amid its laughing gardens Bruno first imbibed a love of nature, which marked him out from so many of his contemporaries. The soil of Nola is among the most fertile of all Italy, and the pleasant plain in which it lies is ringed with hills which lie shadowy under the clear sky; most prominent and most mysterious is Vesuvius, a few miles to the south. But the charms of natural beauty in Nola were surpassed by those of picturesque antiquity: the half-mythical Pelasgians founded it before the walls of Rome were begun; they were followed by the Chalcidians of Cuma, from whom the Nolans inherited a Greek spirit, calm yet quick, eager in the pursuit of wisdom and in the love of beauty, which down even to the 16th century distinguished them above other Italians. There followed a chequered history in which the Samnites, the early Romans, Hannibal, Sulla, and Spartacus, played successive parts. Nola was the death-place of Augustus, and to that fact owed its greatness in Imperial times, when its two great amphitheatres and multitude of beautiful temples topped a great city, shut in by massive walls, with twelve gates that opened to all parts of Italy. Evil times were to come; Alaric, the Saracens, Manfred, and others had their will of Nola, and earthquakes, flood, and plague reduced it by the end of the 15th century to one tenth of its former self. It had its own martyrs, for the old faith and for the new; one of the latter, Pomponio Algerio, suffered during Bruno's lifetime a fate that foreshadowed his own; accused while a student at Padua of contempt for the Christian religion, he was imprisoned in Padua, Venice, and Rome, and finally burnt at the stake. Its sons never lost their love for the mother-town; Bruno speaks of it always with affection, as to him "the garden of Italy"; of a nephew of Ambrogio Leone, the historian of its antiquities, we are told that, on returning to Nola after a few days' absence, seeming ill with longing, he threw himself on the