The wheels creaked, and we gazed out. A throng of fervent figures choked the piazza; men cheering and roaring, women sobbing and casting their cosmetics pots or their mirrors into the blaze; children competing to see who could throw a toy farthest into the flames. A great eight-sided inferno, larger than a house, boiling black smoke in great billows that immediately made little Laura begin to cough. Giulia pulled her daughter away from the window, but I stayed, my stomach rolling sickly. I saw ranks of white-robed Angels singing hymns in their loud fervent voices; Dominicans weeping and lifting their hands up to the heavens as they railed at God. I saw a frail little nun assisting an Angel as he flung a painted panel of nude sea nymphs into the flames; I saw statues and mirrors, velvet hangings and illuminated books and playing cards waiting their turn to be burned. I saw a bent man in a patched robe with tears streaming down his face, praying as he flung armloads of drawings and canvases onto the pyre, and for a moment I thought it was Maestro Botticelli, but I blinked and he had disappeared.

The smoke billowed again, and I saw a black-robed friar with fleshy lips and a great hooked nose, elevated above the others. He flung his arms upward, outspread like a crucifix, howling at the heavens, and I was too far away to hear any of his words, but I heard the answering screams responding to the cries of the beast himself. Fra Savonarola flung one finger out toward his personal inferno, and I saw the figure that had been propped at the very top of Florence’s illicit luxuries. The bulky, straw-stuffed figure of a man in rich jeweled robes.

“Is it His Holiness?” Giulia said, low-voiced.

The smoke coiled down again like a tremendous serpent, hiding everything from my eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Do they really hate him so much?”

“Of course they do, madonna. They are sheep, and they believe whatever they are told. Everyone hates powerful men.”

“They wouldn’t if they knew him,” she said passionately. “If they saw how hard he works—how he denies himself sleep and wine and rich food—”

“Not much else,” I murmured.

“How he’ll receive any petitioner, no matter how low-born, because he says every man should have the right to address the Holy Father—how he wouldn’t even care that they say these things of him, because he says Rome is a free city and anyone can say or write what they please!” Giulia took the crumpled ball of the pamphlet and flung it out the window, clutching Laura even tighter. “Does that sound like an Antichrist to you?”

“We’re in Florence, not Rome,” I said, and waved out the window at Savonarola’s hell. “This is not a free city to be saying anything.”