Galileo and more Florence

Museo Galileo and more of Florence

We slept late again today, and are close to getting our rhythm back.  After breakfast we strolled along the streets which have very pricey shops with famous names.  Some of the fashions were, to my eye, simply outrageous.  We passed a few antique stores which were fun to rummage in.  As our entire next week will be art based, our destination today was the Museo Galileo for some science history.

The museum is wonderful!  Concentrating on the developments in science in Europe from the 16^th to the 19^th century, it is especially focused on the contributions of Galileo and the support of the Medici family for scientific development.  There is a great bust of Galileo:

 The large number of inventive constructions by Galileo which demonstrated principles he developed, are beautifully displayed.  This simple trough on a slant with bells demonstrated the law of falling bodies.  The bells rang at equal time intervals despite the distance between them increasing down the slant, as the rolling ball accelerated.  This may seem intuitive to us, but the demonstration was, apparently, revolutionary in his day:

There are many other beautifully constructed mechanical devices which illustrate or prove various physical principles.  A room of the museum was devoted to anatomical models of childbirth from the 18^th century.  They were remarkable, but had no context labels.  Here’s a model of an obstetric disaster—a breech birth with the baby’s head facing the mother’s abdominal wall instead of the back, and the head tipped back (extended).  This is undeliverable as is.  The instruments in the photo were not contemporaneous, and this is a situation where the baby almost certainly would die and the mother possibly too.

There were rooms of various kinds of astrolabes with wonderful videos showing how they could be used, including to tell time at night.  Only if the sky was clear, of course. 

This 16^th century armillary sphere has the earth at the middle and God at the top.  The seven known planets move around the earth:

 We spent hours there, and finally left in the early afternoon.  We had a light lunch, and walked back toward the hotel, this time passing through the Piazza della Signora and the copy of the incredible Michelangelo David:

Also on the Piazza is the famous statue of Neptune by Bandinelli:

More about these later, I’m sure.  As Road Scholar’s education is generally wonderful, but their choices of restaurants is less so, we splurged tonight.  Florence has six Michelin star restaurants, and we had dinner in one, Winter Garden. It was special:

Tomorrow we meet up with the Road Scholar group.  More then.