Costa San Giorgio: Galileo's Steep Street
Why is it significant?
Lean into the slope and catch your breath: Costa San Giorgio is one of the steepest streets in Florence, a ribbon of cobbles squeezed between garden walls, with wisteria and ivy spilling over the top. Look along the lane for a house with a plaque. It belonged to the most famous scientist of his age.
Key Facts
| Place | Costa San Giorgio: Galileo's Steep Street |
|---|---|
| Address | Costa San Giorgio 19, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76470, 11.25570 |
| Part of Walk | Florence's Green Hill: Bardini Garden, San Miniato & Piazzale Michelangelo |
| Generated | Generated |
Lean into the slope and catch your breath: Costa San Giorgio is one of the steepest streets in Florence, a ribbon of cobbles squeezed between garden walls, with wisteria and ivy spilling over the top. Look along the lane for a house with a plaque. It belonged to the most famous scientist of his age.
In 1610 Galileo Galilei was a professor in Padua, and he had just pointed a home-made telescope at the night sky. He saw mountains on the Moon, countless stars in the Milky Way, and four little moons circling Jupiter. With brilliant timing he named those moons the Medicean Stars, after the young Grand Duke Cosimo the Second, his former pupil. The flattery worked. That same year he was called home to Florence as the Grand Duke's chief mathematician and philosopher.
He rented a house here, on this steep street on the edge of the city. Imagine him climbing up from the river in the evening, a telescope under his arm, heading for the darker sky of the hills to observe the phases of Venus and the spots on the Sun. Those spots were a problem. A perfect heaven was not supposed to have blemishes.
The trouble that followed is well known. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition condemned him for defending the idea that the Earth moves around the Sun, and he spent his last years under house arrest in a villa at Arcetri, in the hills to the south of here. He died there in 1642, almost blind.
And a strange relic of him survives in Florence. When his body was moved to a grand tomb in the following century, admirers removed several fingers, and one of them, a middle finger, is still displayed in the science museum by the Arno, pointing at the sky. Keep climbing to the top of Costa San Giorgio, where the street runs straight into an old city gate.