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Florence's Museo Galileo

At more than 80 years old, Museo Galileo is home to some of the earliest science and technology artifacts.

By Dava SobelPublished 8 years ago 6 min read
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Located near Ponte Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria, Museo Galileo is in the Florence’s historical center. Formerly the Museum of History of Science, Museo Galileo is dedicated to the education and preservation of science history. Since its founding in 1927, the museum has grown to be an archive of scientific instruments and an institute focused on the research, dissemination, and documentation of technology and science. Museo Galileo boasts an impressive specialized library, multimedia center, photographic and restoration laboratories, and more.

I've never liked science museums that offer nothing but mural-sized pages from textbooks and "please touch" exhibits blinking and whirring and explaining themselves in tape-recorded messages. Those places are too pat, too neat. They throw you a plastic replica of some dinosaur skeleton in a bow to evolution, but they never admit that science itself has a history— full of fits and starts and theories that went extinct in the night. As a child, I would come away from such magic shows with terribly distorted ideas: that the universe had all been figured out, for example, and that nature's laws were innately obvious (to everybody but me), and that the whole scientific enterprise had sprung full-blown from the head of Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin or somebody like that.

But at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy among ancient instruments that occupy three floors of an even more ancient building, I got a real sense of the sweaty, human struggle for exploration and experiment. There are so many tools of discovery housed there that only a fraction of them are behind glass, the rest stand out in the open, without so much as a sneeze guard to protect them. The lens through which Galileo first saw the four large moons of Jupiter is on display broken by his own hand, along with two of his small telescopes (only about a meter long), one covered with paper, the other with fine Italian leather tooled in gold.

via Museo Galileo

Not only was science once upon a time lavishly decorated, fluted, carved, painted, and gilded, but it hung for a while on mysticism and sacred relics. Witness, in the room commemorating Galileo's prize achievements, a case that contains the middle finger of his right hand. Mummy-pale, with the bones showing through the translucent skin, it rests inside a gold adorned glass egg, atop an inscribed pedestal of wood and ivory. The finger points upward, and I like to think it still protests the powers that made Galileo denounce Earth's motion around the Sun.

Galileo died in 1642, at the age of seventy-eight. But strange things continued to happen to him. "In the early 18th century," the museum's English-language guidebook says, "Galileo's body was moved from its initial resting place to its present location in the main body of the Church of Santa Croce. In that move several fingers and a vertebra were taken and preserved independently. This one remains a testament to certain tastes of that century."

Globe Collection

via Museo Galileo

Probably the oldest item in the museum's collection is an Arabic globe made in Spain around 1080. Instead of depicting the landmasses of the planet, the surface of the sphere represents the constellations. (Celestial globes like this one are believed to date back to ancient Greece, some 550 years before Christ and 400 years before the first terrestrial globe). One of its two meridians bears the inscription: "This globe with its pedestal was made... by... the weigher in Valencia, and Muhammad his Son, and the fixed stars are placed on it according to their magnitudes and diameters. It was completed in the 478th year of the Hegira of the Prophet. God bless him and grant him perfect peace."

The museum's several dozen celestial globes were built on the idea that the earth was at the center of the universe and that the orbits of the stars formed concentric rings around it. Astrologers, astronomers, and master craftsmen constructed ever more elaborate models of this cosmic structure, even after Copernicus tried to put the sun at the center in 1543. One such armillary sphere, on the museum's second floor, stands taller than two men and is supported on a base of four bare breasted, golden mermaids. At first glance, its wheels within wheels appear to be the cogs of a giant clock, but peering through them reveals a tiny painted model of Earth at the core. This globe is surrounded by the spheres of the seven wanderers—the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Next is the eighth sphere, that of the "fixed stars" and the band of the zodiac. The ninth circle represents the Primum Mobile, or the Prime Mover (you know who He is), whose shell is politically decorated with the coat of arms of the Medici and Lorena families. Santucci dalle Pomerance started this work in 1588 and finished it in 1593. Unlike the many armillary spheres that were used to teach cosmology or to make observations or mathematical descriptions of celestial mechanics, this one he built was purely for ornament.

Early Equipment

via Tuscany Arts

Other museum pieces based on heavenly motions are sundials of all description and their less well known counterparts, the night dials, or nocturnals, which indicated the hours of darkness by the relative positions of certain stars.

During those years when the workings of nature were so far from obvious, the lives and work habits of scientists were much more solitary than they are today and much more subject to scorn and censure. But between 1657 and 1677, a collaborative group of experimentalists met regularly in Florence to conduct research in the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences. The men called themselves the Accademia del Cimento, from the word cimentare, which is what goldsmiths do to test the purity of precious metals. The accademia was out to test and establish the purity of nature's laws. The museum displays some of their beautiful glass thermometers, woven and coiled into unique shapes. Some of them look far too fragile to have endured three centuries. The accademia’s clinical thermometers, called tadpoles, were festooned with ribbons that tied them to the patient's arm. Inside the frog-shaped glass vial, small Solid spheres of various colors, each one of a different density floated in liquid. As the patient's body heat warmed the liquid, the practitioner read his temperature from the depths of the spheres.

Later medical developments represented in the museum are plush-lined cases of ivory-handled surgical instruments and an entire wall of detailed models depicting obstetrical complications observed at the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova.

On the third floor, above the surveying tools and the microscopes, was the "sala di meccanica"—a fun house full of whirligigs that demonstrated physical principles such as acceleration and inertia. Of Course, these are hand-carved and inlaid, and some are fiendishly clever—like the model that showed how to draw water simultaneously from four wells by using only two horses.

Plan A Visit

via Tuscany Arts

The museum itself is among the oldest buildings in Florence—a 12th century castle that was once part of the city walls. It spent time as a fortress and was partially destroyed when the Arno overflowed its banks in 1333. In 1574, the magistrates of the Tuscan government occupied it, followed by the National Library in the 19th century and the museum in the 20th. The museum had existed at various addresses around the city since 1775, moving as the collection was enlarged and more money became available. Today it includes a library for visiting scholars.

The price of admission is cheap not counting the airfare to Italy. And if you like art museums, the Uffizi Gallery is right next door.

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About the Creator

Dava Sobel

American writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. Books include Longitude and Galileo's Daughter.

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