His name was Domenico Scandella, but he was called Menocchio.
He was born in 1532 (at his first trial he claimed he was fifty-two years old) in Montereale, a small hill town of the Friuli twenty-five kilometers north of Pordenone at the foot of the mountains. Here he had always lived, except for two years when he was banished following a brawl (1564-65). These years he spent at the neighboring village of Arba and in an unspecified place in the Carnia. He was married and had eleven children, four of whom had died. Declared to the canon Giambattista Maro, vicar general to the inquisitor of Aquileia and Concordia, that he earned his living as a “miller, carpenter, sawyer, mason, and other things.” But mostly he worked as a miller; he also wore the traditional miller’s costume, a jacket, cloak, and a cap of white wool. Thus dressed in white he presented himself at his trial in 1584.
A couple of years later he told the inquisitors that he was “very poor”: “I do not have anything but two rented mills and two fields in perpetual lease, and with these I have supported and continue to support my poor family. “But certainly he must have been exaggerating. Even if a good part of the income went to pay the rent (probably in produce) on the two mills, in addition to the ground rent on the land, there must have been enough left over to live on and to scrape by on even in difficult times. When he had found himself banished to Arba, he had immediately rented another mill. When his daughter Giovanna married (Menocchio had died about a month before), she received a dowry equal to 256 lire and 9 soldi: she wasn’t rich but she was not that poor either, considering the practices of the area in those years.