At Noli Bruno gained a living for about five months by teaching grammar to boys and lecturing in private to some gentlefolk upon the Sphere.  The doctrine of the Sphere formed a somewhat miscellaneous branch of mediaeval science.  It embraced the exposition of Ptolemaic astronomy, together with speculations on the locality of heaven, the motive principle of the world, and the operation of angelical intelligences.  Bruno, who professed this subject at various times throughout his wanderings, began now to use it as a vehicle for disseminating Copernican opinions.  It is certain that cosmography formed the basis of his philosophy, and this may be ascribed to his early occupation with the sphere.  But his restless spirit would not suffer him to linger in those regions where olive and orange and palm flourish almost more luxuriantly than in his native Nola.  The gust of travel was upon him.  A new philosophy occupied his brain, vertiginously big with incoherent births of modern thought.  What Carlyle called ‘the fire in the belly’ burned and irritated his young blood.  Unsettled, cast adrift from convent moorings, attainted for heresy, out of sympathy with resurgent Catholicism, he became a Vagus Quidam—­a wandering student, like the Goliardi of the Middle Ages.  From Noli he passed to Savona; from Savona to Turin; from Turin to Venice.  There his feet might perhaps have found rest; for Venice was the harbor of all vagrant spirits in that age.  But the city was laid waste with plague.  Bruno wrote a little book, now lost, on ‘The Signs of the Times,’ and lived upon the sale of it for some two months.  Then he removed to Padua.  Here friends persuaded him to reassume the cowl.  There were more than 40,000 monks abroad in Italy, beyond the limits of their convent.  Why should not he avail himself of house-roof in his travels, a privilege which was always open to friars?  From Padua he journeyed rapidly again through Brescia, Bergamo and Milan to Turin, crossed Mont Cenis, tarried at Chambery, and finally betook himself to Geneva.

Geneva was no fit resting-place for Bruno.  He felt an even fiercer antipathy for dissenting than for orthodox bigotry.  The despotism of a belligerent and persecuting sectarian seemed to him more intolerable, because less excusable, than the Catholic despotism from which he was escaping.  Galeazzo Caracciolo, Marquis of Vico, who then presided over the Italian refugees in Geneva, came to visit him.  At the suggestion of this man Bruno once more laid aside his Dominican attire, and began to earn his bread by working as a reader for the press—­a common resort of needy men of learning in those times.  But he soon perceived that the Calvinistic stronghold offered no freedom, no security of life even, to one whose mind was bent on new developments of thought.  After two months’ residence on the shores of Lake Leman he departed for Toulouse, which he entered early in 1577.