Description
In Three Fires, award-winning author Denise Mina re-imagines the ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, a series of fires lit throughout Florence at the end of the fifteenth century – inspired by the fanatical Girolamo Savonarola. Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar living in Florence at the tail end of the fifteenth century. An anti-corruption campaigner his hellfire preaching increasingly spilled over into tirades against all luxuries that tempted people towards sin.
These sermons led to the infamous ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ – a series of fires lit throughout Florence for the incineration of everything from books, extravagant clothing, playing cards, musical instruments, make-up and mirrors, to paintings, tapestries and sculptures. Railing against the vice and avarice of the ruling Medici family, he was instrumental in their removal from power, and for a time became the puritanical leader of the city. After turning his attention to corruption in the entire Catholic Church, he was first excommunicated and then executed by a combination of hanging and being burnt at the stake.
