Top Ten Book Burnings

The list, care of Mental Floss.

From the piece...

1. The bonfire of the vanities, 1497.

These days the phrase refers to any time a mass burning of literature and the arts takes place, but this is the one that really gave birth to the term. A Dominican priest by the name of Girolamo Savonarola declared a long laundry list of items immoral and sinful: cosmetics, mirrors, games, paintings, pagan books, sculptures, fancy clothing, instruments and much, much more. He and his followers rallied the public to rid themselves of all things, and on February 7, 1497, they burned a massive pile of stuff, sending swirls of smoke across Florence for days. It’s been said that we lost many Botticelli paintings to this particular fire, possibly at the hands of Botticelli himself. The tables had turned by 1498, though, and Savonarola was executed in a particularly gruesome but fitting way: he was burned to death on the same spot where his famed bonfire of the vanities had taken place a little more than a year earlier.