Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Born in 1548 in Nola, near Naples in southern Italy, Bruno became a Dominican friar, but before long grew increasingly critical of orthodox theology and was excommunicated in 1576. He left the order and fled to Geneva, where he embraced Calvinism for a time, but finding that the Reformed Church was no more tolerant of his ideas than the Catholic, he adopted the life of a wandering scholar, settling at different times in Paris, Oxford, and Frankfurt, and writing treatises on a vast range of topics, including mathematics, magic, and the occult." [Furtado: 1001 Days]