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Born in Siena, Italy, Ochino rose to become general of the Capuchin order at the age of fifty-one, crowning a brilliant career as a Catholic preacher so popular that "the Pope had to regulate his engagements". 27 Crowds flocked to him everywhere, even climbing on church roofs when inside was full. Twelve cardinals once attended one of his sermons in Rome.

He began to question the Roman doctrines, and then everything changed. He left his order. He became a fugitive across Europe. In 1542, at fifty-five years of age, he crossed the Alps to Geneva. At fifty-eight, he fell in love with another Italian refugee, married and moved to Augsburg. He fled to Basel, then to London, then to Zurich. His public disapproval of the Huguenots taking arms to defend themselves against their Catholic persecutors in France led to yet another move. In the winter of 1563, Ochino, now seventy-six years old, and a widower with four children under fifteen, left his married daughter in Switzerland and took the road yet again, this time for Poland.

Despite his advancing years, Poland could not be home to Ochino and his family for long. He offended the Catholics by denying that Jesus died as a substitute and by demonstrating that the real purpose of the death of Christ was not to change God but to change us. So as an alien he was exiled. A Polish nobleman offered him some land so that he could claim citizenship. Ochino declined this way of escape and took again to the road, this time to seek refuge with the Brethren in Moravia.

Three of his four children who set out with him never reached

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Moravia: they died on the way. The old man and his surviving son stayed in Moravia with a fellow Italian refugee brother. But as he himself had put it "the wings of Antichrist were everywhere" and they prepared to move yet once more.

Now he had a letter offering protection -- from which Christian ruler? No, from the 'infidel' Turk! The Prince of Transylvania, in Turkish-occupied Romania, offered "little Bernard" and his son a safe haven at last.

They never got to Transylvania. Bernardino Ochino, who must have felt by this time that he had gone through nine lives, was laid to rest in the hills of Moravia, to await the angelic call to make his final move, to inherit "a better country, that is an heavenly".