Nov 2002 Museums
Institute and Museum of the History of Science Florence, Italy
On the north bank of the Arno River in Florence, in a small, second-story room in a building more than eight centuries old, is an object that can send shivers down your spine, even on a warm Tuscan morning. Not shivers of fear but of amazement. It is a small thing, not much larger than a half-dollar coin, yet it changed the world: the lens from Galileo's first telescope. Through it Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the mountains and valleys of Earth's moon; he discovered that the Milky Way consists of innumerable stars. No one who put an eye to this small piece of glass could doubt that Earth had been displaced from the center of creation. The lens is one of the crown jewels of science, sheltered now in a museum not far from where Galileo was kept under house arrest by the Inquisition for eight years until his death in 1642.
Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science is itself a gem. Housed in the Palazzo Castellani, a 12th-century castle, the museum charts the birth of modern science, from its tenuous origin in the medieval Islamic world to its flowering in Florence, where the Renaissance began. In a city that is home to Michelangelo's David, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, and 15th-century architect Filippo Brunelleschi's magnificent cupola atop the Duomo cathedral, the elegant repository of science treasures is overlooked by many visitors. Don't make that mistake. The museum is quiet and uncrowded; its windows overlook the Arno, providing a view not much changed since Galileo's day. And a 90-minute visit will allow you to feast your eyes on tools used by Michelangelo, priceless scientific antiques collected by the powerful Medici family, and a millennium of history.
Every few paces in the museum take you past decades, if not centuries, of scientific achievement. The first room you enter contains an early sextant, perhaps used by an Arab sailor aboard a ship exploring the uncharted coast of Africa. Nearby are dozens more exquisite Arabic instruments, some of them nearly a thousand years old: sundials, navigational tools, and celestial globes etched with the constellations, all from a time when scientific instruments were painstakingly crafted works of art, often owned and used by princes. With these tools, Arab scholars made the first accurate maps of the sky, and so the universe became a larger place.
