At the southern end of Piazza della Cancelleria, in front of the palace, is one of several entrances to Piazza Campo de’ Fiori , in many ways Rome’s most appealing square. Home to a lively fruit and vegetable market (Mon-Sat 8am-1pm), it’s flanked by restaurants and cafés, busy pretty much all day. No one really knows how the square came by its name, which means “field of flowers”, but one theory holds that it was derived from the Roman Campus Martius, which used to cover most of this part of town; another claims it is after Flora, the mistress of Pompey, whose theatre used to stand on what is now the northeast corner of the square - a huge complex by all accounts, which stretched right over to Largo Argentina. You can still see the foundations in the basement of the Da Pancrazio restaurant, on the tiny Piazza del Biscione, and the semicircular Via di Grotta Pinta retains the rounded shape of the theatre. Later, Campo dei Fiori was an important point on papal processions between the Vatican and the major basilicas of Rome (notably San Giovanni in Laterano) and a site of public executions. The most notorious killing here is commemorated by the statue of Giordano Bruno in the middle of the square. Bruno was a late-sixteenth-century freethinker who followed the teachings of Copernicus and was denounced to the Inquisition; his trial lasted for years under a succession of different popes, and finally, when he refused to renounce his philosophical beliefs, he was burned at the stake.