Credit: iStockPhoto
JUST OVER 400 years ago, an Italian professor named Galileo Galilei aimed a telescope skyward and changed our view of the universe forever. It's hardly a surprise, then, that Italians venerate Galileo as a hero, in the way that England honours Newton and the United States celebrates the Wright brothers.
Yet discovering the Galileo trail can be a challenge. Many guidebooks pay little attention to the history of science and, often, one finds only a tiny plaque where a grand statue - or a museum - might have been expected. Galileo's birthplace in Pisa is a case in point. It wasn't mentioned in my Lonely Planet guide, and I had to track down its location, tucked away in the city's quiet San Francesco quarter, just north of the river Arno.
Galileo was born in a modest apartment on Via Giuseppe Giusti, at number 24. The simple, four-storey building hardly stands out; only an Italian flag and a small plaque indicate that the father of modern astronomy was born within the pinkish-brown walls. With a little imagination, however, we can picture the scene as it might have been in Galileo's time, when the neighbourhood was home to artists, craftsmen and shopkeepers. His father, Vincenzo Galilei, had settled here with his wife just a year before the birth of their son.
You may be wondering, as I was, why Galileo's parents gave him a name that was a virtual carbon copy of the family name. "'Galileo Galilei' - it sounds like an echo or a yodel," Dava Sobel, author of Galileo's Daughter, tells me. It was the custom at that time, she explains, for families in Tuscany to give their first son a name based on the family name. Over the centuries, the given name won out; history remembers the scientist simply as Galileo.
His father, Vincenzo, was a professional musician; many of his compositions have survived, and you can find modern recordings of them on CD. Perhaps the young Galileo learned to play the lute here at his family home, by his father's side; we know that in time he became an accomplished musician and poet in his own right. This musical knowledge would be of great use to him in later life, when his interests turned to the physical sciences.
In Galileo's day, there were no clocks or watches accurate enough to track time to less than a second - but someone with musical training could estimate time down to perhaps a sixty-fourth of a second, Sobel says.
GALILEO'S FATHER hoped his son would become a doctor; instead, the youngster developed an interest in mathematics. He studied at the University of Pisa and later took his first teaching job there. Many of the university buildings still look much as they did in Galileo's time.
The city's star attraction is, of course, the iconic Leaning Tower - actually one of three spectacular Romanesque structures that make up the Piazza dei Miracoli (the Field of Miracles), along with the enormous cathedral and adjacent baptistry. Visitors who pay the 15 euro admission fee, and climb the 293 steps to the top, are rewarded with a breathtaking view of the town.
As I peered out from the top of the tower, I kept thinking to myself; "Did he, or didn't he?" It must have been incredibly tempting: to drop objects of different weights from the top of the tower, watching them plunge 57 m to the ground below, to see if they really do land at the same time, as Aristotle had argued.
With its convenient tilt, the tower would have been the perfect place for Galileo to test his theories of motion, and of falling bodies in particular. (And, yes, the tower was already leaning in Galileo's time; built between 1173 and 1350, it had started to lean before it was even finished.)
The story of Galileo and the tower may be more legend than fact. There's only one written account, set down by a former student many years later. But I was lucky enough to witness a re-creation of the famous experiment by Steve Shore, an American physicist based at the University of Pisa, as part of the 400-year anniversary celebrations of Galileo first aiming a telescope at the night sky in 1609.
