Museo Galileo

My day started off educational enough. I woke up at 9:00am on this Festa della Repubblica morning, a holiday for the Italian republic (no school!). Still on my list of things to see was the Museo Galileo, a science museum containing a vast collection of scientific instruments dating back to the Renaissance. The walk over was pleasant in that it wasn't scorching hot; however, Florence's famous humidity was showing itself, and it took me almost half an hour in the museum for my body temperature to reach homeostasis. 

The entrance fee is 8€ (boy do I miss Paris' free museums for EU young'uns such as myself!) and the museum features two floors full of telescopes, microscopes, globes, astrolabes, quadrants, lenses, and various other experimental devices. Unfortunately photos are not allowed, so I am going to describe things with my faulty memory (as I write this it is already 2 days after the fact, so my apologies).

At first everything is simply overwhelming. WTML is a quadrant? HTML did people use it and the other hundred instruments you see before you? What should you concentrate on reading and what should you just glance over? The museum's collection is so rich that it's hard to make that decision. I went from extreme-concentration to apathy to more extreme-concentration. 

What strikes you (or at least struck me) was the ingenuity of it all. How did cartographers work before satellite imaging? What would make Galileo think of reflecting the sun's image onto a small space so that he could sketch its sun spots? How freaked out were people when electricity was first discovered? Today we are so used to new inventions and the exponential growth of technology--whether being its usage or scope--that a newer, tinier iPod isn't that impressive after a few minutes. But back then, what a huge shift in ideology when the earth was declared round, not flat. And even before the Renaissance, back in ancient Greece and Egypt--how were they able to calculate and hypothesize the same things thousands of years prior? 

Sir Isaac Newton humbly once said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." It is always due to someone's earlier discovery that a new one can be made.

My favourite objects in the museum were Antonio Santucci's Armillary Sphere (actually the globes in general) and Pietro Leopoldo's chemistry cabinet. I also loved that in several of the rooms, there were flat-screen TVs showing animations of how different inventions were discovered or used. Another notable sight was a glass case that enclosed three of Galileo's fingers.

I guess now that I've looked through their in-depth website to provide these links, you really have no reason to go in person--all the information is already online!

I spent almost 3 hours in the museum and by the end knew that I was tired because I started reading all of the captions and signs in English instead of Italian--my deteriorating Italian is truly a telltale sign that is positively correlated with tiredness.

Today's word of the day is bussola, or "compass".

PS. I cannot mention cartography without thinking about Buster in Arrested Development!