Museo Galileo

Few rooms on earth let you stand this close to the instruments that rearranged the sky. In a riverside palace a few steps from the Uffizi, the Museo Galileo keeps the only two telescopes known to survive from Galileo's own hands, together with the framed objective lens of the instrument through which he first picked out the moons of Jupiter in January 1610. Around them are gathered several centuries of Tuscan curiosity: astrolabes, sundials, globes, compasses, surveying tools and early thermometers, assembled first by the Medici and later by the Habsburg-Lorraine grand dukes who followed them.

The collection began as a princely hobby. Cosimo I kept his instruments in the wardrobe of Palazzo Vecchio, and around 1600 Ferdinando I moved them to a dedicated mathematics room in the Uffizi. The showpiece of that era still dominates the first floor: a gilded armillary sphere built by Antonio Santucci between 1588 and 1593, a wooden model of the Earth-centred universe as it was understood just before Galileo's observations made it obsolete. Later additions include apparatus used by the Accademia del Cimento, one of Europe's earliest experimental societies, while the second floor carries the story into the age of electricity, chemistry and precision engineering, with the Lorraine dynasty's demonstration machines, a grand-ducal chemistry cabinet and anatomical wax models once used to teach obstetrics. The scattered holdings were reunited in 1930, when the University of Florence founded an institute and museum of the history of science here. After a two-year renovation it reopened in 2010 under Galileo's name, marking four centuries since the publication of his Sidereus Nuncius.

The building has its own long past. Palazzo Castellani grew out of an eleventh-century riverside stronghold, was rebuilt as a residence after the Arno flood of 1333, and for more than two centuries housed one of the city's courts of justice, whose coats of arms still mark the entrance hall. Florence itself, the Tuscan capital whose bankers and artists shaped the Renaissance, is usually remembered for painting and sculpture; this museum is a reminder that the same patrons paid just as eagerly for mathematics, navigation and astronomy. Its most talked-about exhibit is a relic rather than an instrument: the middle finger of Galileo's right hand, detached when his remains were moved to a monumental tomb in Santa Croce in 1737, and displayed under a glass dome like a saint's relic.

Getting there

The museum stands in the historic centre of Florence, on Piazza dei Giudici beside the Arno, about 1.5 km from the city's geographic centre and an easy walk from the Uffizi and Ponte Vecchio. Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR) lies about 6 km to the north-west, linked to the centre by tram. The main railway station, Firenze Santa Maria Novella, is on Italy's high-speed line between Rome, Bologna and Milan and is roughly a 20-minute walk away.