Up Yours
Posted on Tuesday 2 November 2004
Though humiliated and forced to recant his most important works by the ecclesiastical authorities, the great man's finger remains to this day upright, defiant and unwavering.--- Galileo in a letter to Kepler in 1610
Galileo at the time of his death did not receive a proper burial
because of the condemnation that he received in
1633. Instead, his remains were kept in storage at the Capella dei
Santi Cosma e
Damiano in Rome. In 1737 they were transferred to a more fitting
mausoleum built in his honour by Vincenzo Viviani at the Church of
Saint Croce in Florence.
It was at this time that his middle finger was removed and placed -
like a relic of one of the saints - on public display. It now resides
at Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science.
The incription on the base of the display stand reads:
This is the finger, belonging to the illustrious hand
that ran through the skies,
pointing at the immense spaces, and singling out new stars,
offering to the senses a marvelous apparatus
of crafted glass,
and with wise daring they could
reach where neither Enceladus nor Tiphaeus ever reached.
--- Tommaso Perelli (1704-1783)
Incidentally, while a storage locker in the chapel of Santi Cosma e Damiano may not have been one of the grandest of locations to have been interred, the place does have quite an interesting history all of its own. One and a half millennia earlier, one of the church's walls had served as part of the ancient Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace), which had been built by Emperor Vespasian after the sacking of Jerusalem in 71 AD.
On this wall was mounted the world's most remarkable street directory.
that ran through the skies,
pointing at the immense spaces, and singling out new stars,
offering to the senses a marvelous apparatus
of crafted glass,
and with wise daring they could
reach where neither Enceladus nor Tiphaeus ever reached.
--- Tommaso Perelli (1704-1783)
Incidentally, while a storage locker in the chapel of Santi Cosma e Damiano may not have been one of the grandest of locations to have been interred, the place does have quite an interesting history all of its own. One and a half millennia earlier, one of the church's walls had served as part of the ancient Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace), which had been built by Emperor Vespasian after the sacking of Jerusalem in 71 AD.
On this wall was mounted the world's most remarkable street directory.
