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Tact was not Galileo’s forte, neither in his personal affairs nor in
his public life. A short, red-haired man he had – as Jakob Bronowski remarked
– rather more children than a bachelor should have. He was argumentative
and known to his colleagues as ‘the wrangler’. And in his dialogue between
proponents of the Ptolemaic and Copernican views of the world, the Ptolemaic
spokesman is called Simplicius, a jibe which Pope Urban VIII took as a personal
insult and which triggered Galileo’s trial.

Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 in Pisa and studied at the university
there. The house where he lived in the via Santa Maria survives, a comfortable
bourgeois house. A Latin inscription on a weathered stone plaque set into
the ochre-washed wall identifies it as Galileo’s. Just a couple of minutes’
walk away is the leaning tower of Pisa. Inevitably stories link Galileo
to the cathedral and its bell tower.

A bronze and glass chandelier above the nave in the cathedral is known
as Galileo’s lamp. The story goes that while he was at a service in the
cathedral his attention wandered away from matters ecclesiastical to the
swaying of the chandelier in a draught above the nave.

THE LAMP AND THE PENDULUM

He noticed that although the lamp swung back and forth more when the
wind was strong and less when it dropped, the time the lamp took to complete
one movement – great or small – was constant. He had discovered the principle
of the pendulum. The problem with this story is that Galileo published the
results of his work in 1583 – six years before the chandelier was made.

In the best-known story, Galileo demonstrates the constant acceleration
of gravity by dropping two cannonballs – one ten times heavier than the
other – from the leaning tower. The Aristotelian view was that heavier object
would fall faster than the lighter one. The cannonballs hit the ground at
exactly the same time. Unfortunately, this experiment was not carried out
in Pisa. And not by Galileo, but by a Dutchman, Simon Stevinus. The only
real connection is that the leaning tower of Pisa was at the end of Galileo’s
street.

What is certain is that Galileo left his post as professor of mathematics
at Pisa and moved to the University of Padua in 1592. Padua was then part
of the Venetian republic, and that cruel but enlightened regime allowed
scientific thought to flourish, insulating Padua – to a degree – from the
medieval thinking of the Church.

The significance of the Renaissance – which was the focus of the conventional
Grand Tour was – was that new ideas challenged the conventional wisdom,
largely untouched since the days of Classical Greeks. The Church clung to
the ideas of Aristotle and Ptolemy – pagans both. Their ideas were the Church’s
articles of faith. The University of Padua, established in 1222, was one
of the centres where the old orthodoxies were first confronted.

The university at Padua was a centre of anatomical expertise. Andreas
Vesalius, who was born in Brussels, became professor of medicine. By dissecting
corpses Vesalius worked out the anatomy of the human body and in 1543, while
still at Padua, published the results of his study, together with woodcuts
illustrating examples. His work overturned the view of the human body, derived
from Galens, a Roman who lived in the second century AD. One of Vesalius’s
successors, was Gabriele Fallopio, who was the first to describe the fallopian
tubes. Such were the medical achievements at Padua that the Doge of Venice
authorised the building of a new anatomy theatre. It was opened in 1594.

It is now the world’s oldest surviving anatomy theatre, a chamber with
concentric galleries built around a central table. William Harvey studied
here and took his degree in 1602 before going on to discover the circulation
of the blood.

The university was also a centre for astronomy. In 1501, Nicolaus Copernicus
came to Padua to continue his studies for a couple of years, although he
did not publish his theory of the Solar System, which had the Earth moving
around the Sun, until 1543. It was to this centre of radical thinking
that Galileo arrived at in 1592. He later said that the 18 years he spent
there were the best of his life.

The wood-panelled room where Galileo taught and the anatomy theatre
now form the centre of the university, known as the Bo Palace. This group
of buildings was erected between 1542 and 1601 on the site of a medieval
inn called ‘The Bo’ or ox. Nine worn, wooden stairs lead to the high lectern,
which Galileo used for teaching. The room and anatomy theatre were renovated
in 1992 but neither has yet been opened to the public.

Nevertheless, the medieval courtyard of the Bo Palace is much as it
was in Galilei’s day and can be seen through the ornamental gates on via
Febbraio. You can get inside by slipping into the university’s modern courtyard
next door, turning sharp left and continuing along the corridor, past the
caretaker’s room.

TELESCOPE TRIUMPH

One of Galileo’s greatest triumphs was to develop the telescope. He
learnt of the invention of a spy glass by spectacle makers in Flanders in
1608. But with poor magnification the spy glass was little more than a toy.
Galileo discovered the principle behind this device and developed a far
better version which had a magnification of about thirty times. It was this
instrument which he demonstrated to the Doge of Venice in 1609 from the
top of the campanile in Saint Mark’s Square.

The telescope was an important step forward for astronomy. But for the
Doge it had a far more earthly appeal. The Venetian empire had cornered
the spice trade between Europe and the Orient. With Galileo’s telescope
it was possible to identify incoming ships – and hence their cargoes – when
they were still several hours away from port. This information was worth
a fortune on the Venetian equivalent of the futures market, the merchants
who thronged the Rialto.

The new telescope enabled Galileo to study the heavens in more depth
than anyone had been able to do before. He saw stars that were invisible
to the naked eye. By watching sunspots – there is some controversy over
whether he discovered them – he observed the rotation of the Sun. He saw
that planets were large globes while stars remained points of light and
deduced that the planets were closer to Earth than the stars were. He mapped
the mountains on the Moon and discovered four moons around Jupiter.

Galileo published the results of his observations in about 1610, the
same year he moved to Florence. The telescope that he probably used to observe
Jupiter’s moons is preserved in the Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence,
which has a room devoted to Galileo. The museum has the only two telescopes
in existence to have been used by Galileo – one still has its lenses – and
a gilded bronze astrolabe supposedly used by him. The astrolabe can have
no more than a passing connection with the great scientist – gilded bronze
was too expensive. Working scientists would have used wooden instruments.

COLLISION COURSE

Galileo’s observations effectively proved Copernicus’s hypothesis that
the Earth moved around the Sun. Ptolemy’s view – backed by the Roman church
– that the Sun moved round the Earth and that the Earth was the centre of
the Solar System had to be wrong. The next year, in 1611, Papal informers
began to compile secret reports on this dissident scientist. The Church
and Galileo were on a collision course. In 1616, Galileo went to Rome and
was forced to agree that he would neither defend nor hold Copernicus’s theory.

In 1623, a new Pope was elected, Urban VIII. Galileo hoped he would
be more liberal and met him six times in 1624 in the gardens of the Vatican.
After these meetings he began writing a dialogue between the defenders of
the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican, which he hoped would circumvent
the papal injunction. He published the dialogue in 1632. Naturally, Simplicius,
the defender of the Ptolemaic system was on the losing side of the argument.

The Church was outraged. Galileo was summoned to Rome, and held by the
Inquisition at the Villa Medici. The villa is now the French Academy. Galileo’s
trial by the inquisition was held in a Dominican monastery, which still
stands and is just to the left of the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
Despite its powers, the Inquisition – according to Bronowski – still forged
the evidence against Galileo. Galileo, probably wisely, decided to recant
and was sentenced to house arrest in Florence. In the Villa il Gioiello,
on the outskirts of Florence, Galileo spent the final years of his life.
He died there in 1642. The villa is currently being restored.

Bologna lies halfway between Padua and Pisa, and would be a convenient
base for visiting the sites on the Galileo trail. It is also worth visiting
in its own right. The town’s university, founded in the 12th century, is
the oldest in the world, and from its early days had a remarkable series
of women professors, including the 18th-century mathematician Laura Bassi.

One of the university’s more interesting academics was Giovanni Domenico
Cassini. Cassini was only 15 when Galileo died. But his ability as an astronomer
quickly gained him a professorship at the University of Bologna in 1650,
when he was only 25. At Bologna, Cassini measured the rotation periods
of Jupiter’s four moons discovered by Galileo. And later in life, he calculated
the orbit of Mars, with the help of no fewer than 6000 observations spread
over a couple of years. He also observed the division in Saturn’s rings,
which bears his name.

But where Galileo fell out with the Church, Cassini kept faith – at
least publicly – despite the evidence of his observations. The meridian
line in the Church of San Petronio, which Cassini designed, is a testament
to this accommodation between science and Church.

The meridian is in effect a linear sun-dial. A brass line embedded in
the floor stretches half the length of the nave, almost to the doors of
the church. A small hole in the roof of the church lets in a shaft of sunlight.
At midday (or very nearly) the sunlight crosses the meridian line – the
Renaissance equivalent of the Greenwich time signal. The point where the
Sun crosses the line depends on the date. The months – as well as the signs
of the zodiac – are marked at intervals along the line, enabling bystanders
to tell the date. It is also possible to calculate sunset, from numbers
marked by the line – and hence the time of the evening service. This was
astronomy in the service of religion.

It is not the pinnacle of scientific achievement, but it is a remarkably
peaceful way to spend a few minutes around midday. Cassini’s original drawings
for the line, and a model used for checking the angle of the Sun, are in
a small museum at the back of the church. They show that the line is 250
‘French scientific feet’ long – a measure which was evidently 12.5 per cent
longer than the English foot. Cassini left Bologna in 1669 and went to Paris,
where appropriately enough he became the astronomer to the Sun King, Louis
XIV.

It was at the University of Bologna that Luigi Galvani, a professor
of anatomy, discovered by accident that electricity could move frogs’ legs.
He published his findings in 1791. His most controversial experiment was
to create a circuit of metal and frogs’ legs, but without any outside
source of electricity. He again observed the legs twitch but came to the
erroneous conclusion that the cause of the movement was ‘animal electricity’.
Galvani died in poverty in 1798. The tombs of both Galvani and Bassi are
in the Church of Corpus Domini.

ELECTRICITY WITHOUT FROGS

Galvani’s colleague, Alessandro Volta, working 250 kilometres to the
north in Como, continued Galvani’s work. Volta also found that metal in
a circuit could create electricity without frogs’ legs. But he realised
that he had created a battery and that this was the source of the electricity.
To celebrate Volta’s centenary, the local council gathered together as many
relics of his career as possible. Unfortunately, a fire in 1899 destroyed
much of the exhibition. In 1928 the council built a permanent memorial,
the quasi-classical Temple of Volta, on the shore of Lake Como. However,
many of the exhibits are either scientific instruments from Volta’s time,
parts of equipment that survived the fire or reproductions.

The final stop in this grand tour takes you a few dozen kilometres across
the border into Switzerland and brings you firmly into the twentieth century.
The crucial years in Albert Einstein’s working life were spent in the Bern.

Einstein came to the Swiss capital in 1902 at the age of 23 expecting
to get a job at the Swiss Patent Office. The job took longer to materialise
than he hoped. He rented a bed-sit and tried to make ends meet by giving
mathematics and physics lessons, offering prospective students a free trial
lesson.

After five months of poverty, this shabbily dressed young man finally
got his job – on probation – as a technical expert (third class) at the
Federal Patent Office. In 1903, he married and the Einsteins moved to a
second-floor flat in Kramgasse. It was in this flat that Einstein wrote
the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

The flat in Kramgasse is now a museum. It is immediately above a hairdresser’s
salon. The flat was far from spacious for the two Einsteins, and the child
that arrived in 1904. There are two main rooms, a bedroom at the back,
and a study in the front, separated by a small cubby hole, which was the
child’s room. These rooms form the museum. Across the communal landing was
the bathroom and kitchen, which are not on public view.

The museum, which was only opened in 1979, has a small but fascinating
collection of memorabilia. Einstein’s school certificate, for example, shows
that physics was not his best subject at school (he was better at algebra
and geometry).

Bern has not changed a lot since Einstein’s days. You can still take
the tram from the end of the street, much as Einstein did 90 years before,
down to the town centre where he worked. The patent office where he first
worked is now the offices of the Swiss Post Office.

After work Einstein would go to the Cafe Bollwerk, just a block away
from the patent office, and spend the evening drinking and discussing physics
and philosophy. Bern was where Einstein began to work on the General Theory
of Relativity – although he was not to publish this theory until 1916 –
seven years after leaving Bern.

It is in this cafe in a slightly run down quarter opposite the railway
station that you can perhaps get closest to the genesis of the theories.
The timeless brown-stained wood and the yellow-painted ceiling do not look
as though they have changed much since Einstein’s day. Students still gather
in the evening to mull over the usual heavy mixture of ideas and alcohol.

There is no plaque associating the bar with Einstein, although staff
will point out the great man’s favourite corner (in the middle of the three
rooms and just on your left as you enter). But Einstein might notice one
change. The easiest way to explain the General Theory of Relativity is
that if you are in a ship’s cabin without a porthole, you will not be able
to tell whether the ship is moving or not. Inside the Cafe Bollwerk, you
would be hard pressed to notice the passage of time. But outside the neon
signs proclaim that the establishment is now an Italian restaurant – called
La Gondola.