Celestial splendors

The exhibition is part of the initiatives organized to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Galileo Galilei's most emblematic work, Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), the manifesto of a new philosophy of Nature, an expression of a new investigative method of physical phenomena based on mathematical rigor and empirical concreteness. The work grew out of a dispute begun four years earlier with the Jesuit Orazio Grassi over the nature of comets and world systems.

The dispute over comets, or "celestial splendors," in the definition of the Lincean academicians, was only the pretext for devoting himself to the more ambitious project of promoting a new scientific method to be contrasted with the traditional one, a more rigorous approach to the study of the great 'book of nature' with which Galileo inaugurated the new path of modern science.

The catalogue, in a bilingual edition, retraces the most significant passages from Il Saggiatore commented by distinguished scholars and flanked by illustrations of new experiments conducted with the same genuine curiosity and rigorous method of investigating reality that Galileo himself taught us.