 The first known case of a scholar gaining access to the Inquisition archive was ironically the fiercely anti-clerical scholar Luigi Firpo, who used his close connections with Maurilio Fossati (long-serving Archbishop of Turin) to study the trial of Giordano Bruno.In 1979, a request was made to Pope John Paul II by historian Carlo Ginzburg, an atheist from Jewish background, to open the Inquisition Archives.By 1991 a limited group of scholars were already allowed access to review the material in the archives.