The doors of the prison closing on Bruno bring to an end the story of his life, but from behind these doors there come to us fragments of the story itself as Bruno retells it to his judges. For on the very day of his arrest he is examined by a tribunal composed of the Apostolic Nuncio, the Patriarch of Venice, the Very Reverend Father Inquisitor. Before these, as the clerk of the tribunal records it, was brought a certain man of ordinary height with a chestnut beard, who, when he had been admonished to speak the truth, and before any question could be put to him, burst out of his own accord: “I will tell the truth. Several times have I been threatened with being brought before this Holy Office, but I have always taken the threat for a joke, because I am ever ready to give account of myself.” Whereupon he tells how, having found himself at Frankfurt the previous year, he received there two letters from Gioanni Mocenigo, inviting him to come to Venice to instruct Mocenigo in the art of memory and the art of invention, for which this Venetian gentleman had promised to pay him well and treat him in a way that should content him. And so Bruno had come to Venice seven or eight months before, living first in lodgings, then for a brief space in Padua, until some two months prior to his arrest he had taken up his residence in Mocenigo’s own house. We already know how, “compelled by his conscience and ordered by his confessor,” Mocenigo finally disposed of his guest. Then Bruno questioned by the tribunal, laid before it a formal account of his life. “My name is Giordano Bruno, of the family of the Bruni, of the city of Nola, twelve miles from Naples. In this place I was born and raised, and my profession was and is letters and the sciences. My father was named Gioanni, and my mother Fraulissa Savolina, and my father’s calling was that of a soldier. He is dead since, and my mother too. “I am about forty-four years of age, and I was born, so far as I have heard from my people, in the year 1548. I remained in Naples learning the humanities, logic, and dialectics until fourteen years of age ... and then I took the habit of Saint Dominic in the monastery or convent of Saint Dominic in Naples, and was invested by a Padre who was then prior of that convent, called Maestro Ambrosio Pasqua. When the year of probation was passed, I was admitted by him to profession, which was solemnly made in the same convent.... Later I was promoted to holy orders and at the usual season to the priesthood. I sang my first mass in Campagnia, a city of the same state at a distance from Naples, residing the while in a convent of the order, the San Bartholomeo, and continued in the religious habit of Saint Dominic, celebrating masses and the divine offices, obedient to the superior of the Order and to the priors of the monasteries and convents where I was stationed until 1576....”