On March 2nd, 2008, a monument to Bruno was unveiled at the Potsdamer Platz train station in Berlin, a 6-meter-high bronze statue by Berlin sculptor Alexander Polzin (1973-), an exact copy of the sculpture unveiled on February 17th, 2001, on the 401st anniversary of the philosopher's death, on the campus of the CEU (Central European University) in Budapest. Polzin cast the original bronze from a wooden sculpture, which now stands on the main staircase of the Town Hall in Nola, Bruno's hometown.
The
monument is a memorial for the victims of religious violence,
and on the pedestal of the statue a sentence by Bruno is engraved: "Mi par cosa ridicola
il dire che estra il cielo non sia nulla. Di maniera che non è
un sol mondo, una sola terra, un solo sole: ma tanti son mondi,
quante veggiamo circa di noi lampade luminose" ("It seems to me
ridiculous, to say that nothing exists beyond the sky. There is
no single world, no single earth, no single sun: there are many
worlds, as many as the radiant lights we see around us"), taken
from the first Dialogue of 1584 "De l’infinito, universo
e mondi" ("On the Infinite Universe and Worlds"),
pronounced by the character of Filoteo. The phrase is reported
in the original Italian version, in German, in English and in
Hungarian. The website referred to the monument (in German) is:
https://www.bruno-denkmal.de/index.html.
The Berlin statue was created on the initiative of the Giordano
Bruno Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of
Science, the Italian Institute of Culture and the Central European
University and was donated by the Giordano Bruno Foundation, Uni
Credit Italia, the Humanism Foundation of Berlin, Ernst Salcher
and Wera and Norbert Noetzel.
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created: November
18th 2007 and last updated: June 1st, 2025