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Santa Croce Monumental Complex

Florence, piazza di Santa Croce 16

The church of Santa Croce was built starting in 1295 on the site of an existing Franciscan church. The spiritual, social, productive and cultural life of the entire quarter was organized around this religious center. The church became an extraordinary forge of talent where such artists as Giotto, Donatello and Brunelleschi worked. The presence of funerary monuments of illustrious personages, among them a number of scientists, makes Santa Croce the "pantheon of the Italians", celebrated by Ugo Foscolo in the Sepolcri.

After the death of Galileo Galilei (1642) his remains were placed in a little room below the bell tower of the church of Santa Croce, next to the Chapel of Saints Cosmos and Damian, while awaiting the building of a monumental tomb. This project, however, was opposed by the ecclesiastical authorities, who advised Grand Duke Ferdinando II de' Medici that it was unsuitable to erect a monument to a man convicted by the Church. In 1632, in fact, Galileo had published in Florence the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems] (Florence, 1632), an overtly Copernican work. The Dialogue had been sequestered and the scientist had been summoned to Rome by the Holy Office. The trial had concluded with the conviction of Galileo, who had been forced to abjure and to "abandon the false opinion that the Sun is the center of the world and that it does not move and that the Earth is not the center of the world and that it moves." In spite of this Vincenzo Viviani, the Pisan scientist's youngest disciple, devoted enormous energy to the project for a monumental tomb. A fitting tribute to the scientist would have fully restored Galilean thought in the official cultural debate.   But Viviani was unable to overcome the resistance of the ecclesiastical circles. Only near the end of the reign of Giangastone de' Medici, almost a century after Galileo's death, was it possible to inaugurate the monumental tomb. On 12 March 1737 the mortal remains of Galileo and of Viviani, along with the unexpected third corpse of a woman, probably Galileo's beloved daughter Suor Maria Celeste, were carried in procession from their original burial places to the new tomb. The iconography of the sculptural decoration alludes to the Pisan scientist's greatest intuitions. At the sides of the urn are a statue of Geometry, sculpted by Girolamo Ticciati, celebrating Galileo's research on the inclined plane and on falling bodies, and a statue of Astronomy, the work of Vincenzo Foggini, demonstrating Galileo's discovery of sunspots. The tomb is surmounted by a bust of Galileo holding his telescope. At the top of the monument appears the Galilei family's coat of arms.

In the Basilica are also to be found the tombs of Fossombroni (a decisive figure in the complex work of draining the swamps of Maremma implemented by Leopoldo II), of Eugenio Barsanti, the inventor, in collaboration with Father Felice Matteucci, of the first prototype of internal combustion engine (an engine that utilized the internal combustion of gases to produce motive force) and the physicist Leopoldo Nobili.

The Santa Croce monumental complex is a place of significance for science also for the astronomical fresco in the Pazzi Chapel, designed by Brunelleschi, representing a nocturnal sky, similar to the one in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo.