Menocchio, also known as Domenico Scandella, was a Friulian miller born in 1532 in the village of Montereale, twenty-five kilometers north of Pordenone (not to be confused with present-day Montereale). His philosophical teachings earned him the title of a heresiarch during the Inquisition and he was eventually burned at the stake in 1599, at the age of 67, on orders of Pope Clement VIII. He was married and had eleven children. In 1581 he had been mayor of the village and the surrounding hamlets. He is the subject of Italian Historian Carlo Ginzburg's book, The Cheese and the Worms, reflecting on Menocchio's theories and the society in which he lived and constructed them, as a facet of social history.