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Bonfire of the Vanities (Italian: Falò delle vanità ) refers to the burning of objects that are deemed to be occasions of sin. The most famous one took place on 7 February 1497, when supporters of the Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned thousands of objects like cosmetics and lewd books1 in Florence, Italy, on the Shrove Tuesday festival.
The focus of this destruction was on objects that might tempt one to sin, including vanity items such as mirrors, cosmetics, fine dresses, and even musical instruments. Other targets included immoral books, manuscripts of secular songs, and pictures.
Such bonfires were not invented by Savonarola, however; they were a common accompaniment to the outdoor sermons of San Bernardino da Siena in the first half of the century.
The event has been represented or mentioned in varying degrees of detail in a number of novels, including George Eliot's Romola (1863), Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), Timothy Findley's Pilgrim (1999), Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus (2003) and Ian Caldwell's and Dustin Thomason's Rule of Four (2004). The ritual provided the title of Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and its film adaptation. Events in Margaret Atwood's works frequently allude to the bonfire, as in her dystopian novels The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003).
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