On the morning after his death, following a ceremony held almost in secret for fear the Inquisition might refuse him burial in consecrated ground, Galileo's body was placed in a little room below the bell tower of the Basilica of Santa Croce. A temporary burial place, it was said. Grand Duke Ferdinand II had ambitious plans for a magnificent tomb, as twin to the one designed by Vasari for Michelangelo. The great scientist was to face the artist, in an act of homage that would reflect glory on the dynasty that had protected them. Moreover, it had long been believed that Galileo was born on February 18, 1564, the day of Michelangelo's death, a symbolic handing over of the baton of greatness. Needless to say, none of these plans was ever realised. The Pope himself stepped in to check the Grand Duke of Tuscany's commemorative enthusiasm. Through the ambassador, Francesco Niccolini, he actually issued a further belated judgement: Galileo had been summoned before the Inquisition 'for a very false and very erroneous opinion,' which he had even disseminated and taught, causing 'universal outrage to Christianity with a doctrine that had been condemned.' No sovereign who dedicated a monument to his everlasting memory would appear 'an example to the world.' Grand Duke Ferdinand, who later founded and protected the Academy of the Cimento, was to fly the flag for the Galileian heritage. But now, faced with the veto of God's representative on earth, he yielded, and the modest grave became the definitive one. After several attempts had failed, it was only in 1737 that Galileo had his monumental tomb, differing no doubt from how it would have been nearly a century before, but equally solemn, with a portrait bust, a marble urn, and two statues, one of Astronomy gazing in fascination at the sky and the other of Geometry inconsolable at the death and, perhaps, at the injustice.

 

Present at the bedside of the dying Galileo and at the removal of the body, in addition to his son, Vincenzo, and his direct intellectual heir, Evangelista Torricelli, was the twenty-year-old Vincenzo Viviani. Galileo's last pupil, as he was to refer to himself for the rest of his life, Viviani was to spend his future years in the vain, and at times clumsy, attempt to reinstate his master's ideas. Thanks to a pension granted by the King of France, Louis XIV, he had a house built in Via dell'Amore, called the Palazzo dei Cartelloni (Palace of the Scrolls), a kind of large mausoleum adorned with a portrait bust and commemorative scrolls on the façade, inscribed with the life story of Galileo written in Latin by Viviani himself. All this Viviani had done despite his many anxieties. He had been supposed to write a real biography, initially conceived as a massive and imperishable work, in exchange for the pension that had funded the house. But he never wrote it, in part out of fear of retaliation, in part through his inability to reconcile geometry with the dogmas of faith, and in part influenced by more or less explicit warnings to be prudent (which, at times, came from within), evidently more convincing than the pressure exerted on him from the palaces of Paris by such prominent figures as Jean-Baptiste Colbert, at the time Minister of the King's Palace. Of Viviani as a direct witness, if not always faithful chronicler or clear interpreter, there now remains only the slender Racconto istorico della vita di Galileo Galilei [Historical Account of the Life of Galileo Galilei], written in the form of a letter addressed to Prince Leopoldo de'Medici, and with this we must be content. It was printed, not during Viviani's lifetime, but only in 1717, well camouflaged even then among the dozens of biographies of the Fasti consolari dell'Accademia Fiorentina [A Biographical History of the Florentine Academy] edited by the canon, Salvino Salvini.

 

In time, much time, the waters calmed. Over a century after the death of Galileo, Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, a Florentine notable, who a few years later would also be put on the Index for some witty remarks he had made at the expense of friars, noted in his diary on January 5th 1768.

 

What would Galileo say if he came back to life and saw his hypothesis that the Earth moved around the Sun taught and explained even in almanacs? And yet it is so in the ' Mangia di Siena', an almanac p rinted there with the necessary approval, well explained to both the common people and to the educated, both last year and this. Thus does the world change, and it will change even more, so that in a century or two our grandchildren will perhaps laugh at u s, at our errors and our prejudices.

 

In effect, things had indeed changed. For a long time, the danger of Galileo had been fading, and the Church had been engaged in an attempt to curb the spread of Newton's theories on universal gravitation, already considered proven in the rest of Europe. Clearly, the Church continued to see scientific progress, although within different systems and parameters, as a threat to the conservation of its own power. It had, moreover, hastened to prohibit not Newton's Princi pia, incomprehensible to most and, all things considered, harmless, but the popularized Newtonianismo per le dame [Newtonianism for Ladies] by Francesco Algerotti, comprehensible to all and therefore a source of greater danger. Many of the best minds had gradually turned, as many more were to continue to do, to fields of intellectual activity less risky to their personal safety or simply less harmful to the quality of their lives. This circumstance bore heavily on the direction that Italian culture was to take in the centuries to come. As regards error and prejudice, every age, it seems, produces its own. And they cannot be easy to remedy, considering that Galileo had to wait until 1992 to be recognised as a victim of persecution, and even then the recognition derived from a self-absolving stance, which sought to present the historical context as an extenuating circumstance, with the result that the man himself, irrationally obstinate, his actions ill-timed and even his astronomy deemed untrustworthy, was burdened with the principal responsibility for the whole affair.