On 21 July 1542, with the bull "Licet ab initio", Pope Paul III established the Congregation of the Holy Office: the Roman Inquisition. Unlike its Spanish counterpart, controlled by the crown, this one answered directly to the pope, and was created to stem the spread of the Protestant Reformation in Italy.
But its jurisdiction soon extended to everything that touched the invisible: magic, divination, judicial astrology, forbidden books. Before its tribunals passed Giordano Bruno, burned in Campo de' Fiori in 1600, and Galileo Galilei, forced to abjure in 1633. Every trial, every interrogation, every suspicion was scrupulously put in writing.
From the Index to open archives
The Holy Office still exists — transformed into the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — and in 1998 the Vatican opened its archives to scholars. From those papers emerged a surprising portrait of secret Italy: a country where, for centuries, healers, diviners and readers of the stars stubbornly kept practising their arts, trial after trial.