Give ‘em the Middle Finger

Spend a longer day in Florence and the personal renaissance begins. This week, not one day, we breathed in Galileo. THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTNING, VERY VERY FRIGHTENING ME.

Freddie Mercury and Queen sang about him, but little did they know that Galileo was a bombastic, philosopher with a split brain. Who says stuff like this….”two truths cannot contradict one another. All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; to point is to discover them.

Here’s another zinger….you cannot teach man anything. You can only help him find it within himself.

Okay Galileo, with that statement, you officially became a poster child for Living Seasonally. He said go out and discover the world for yourself, become your best version and learn on your own terms.

So this week, we toured Galileo’s museum, between the Arno River, east of the Ponte Vecchio bridge, and the Piazzo della Signoria. I wish that Steve Lundgren were with us to take in all these inventions. Proceeding without his child like wonder, I was aghast at the depth of inventions and audacious courage he had going toe to toe with the Catholic leaders.

This ballsy, outspoken scientist stood up, declared truths against the enforcer in town and proved that the Earth orbits the sun. By damn, he meant it.

As you walk into the slightly darkened museum, imagine hearing Galileo inviting you over to look at the collection of globes. Carla interrupts him and blurts out…”hey, we saw one of those globes at the Harry Truman Presidential Library.” My snarky come back. “Can’t you be fully present in Florence. I doubt that Galileo would be interested in touring Independence, Missouri.

Tour a museum with Carla and you are always on a hunt for secrets. Not to trump my wife, but here are several that I discovered.

• Galileo Galliliel’s middle finger is on display in a museum. Did he give the middle finger to the Catholic leaders?
• NASA named a spacecraft for him.
• The Vatican didn’t admit Galileo was right until 1992.
• He was the first of six children born to his parents in a Roman Catholic family.
• His father’s intention behind enrolling Galileo in university for medicine was to help him secure better paying jobs in the field of medicine. Galileo, on the other hand, liked mathematics and physics more than medicine. Check out all of his instruments he tinkered with.
• Loved this! For a brief period of time, Galileo also worked as an art teacher in the Italian city of Florence.
• Galileo never married. What?? However, he had three children with Marina Gamba. Two of the children were girls whom Galileo never allowed to marry out of the fear that he would have to pay a hefty dowry. So they were sent to convent and ended up becoming nuns.
• The most important of Galileo’s inventions is the telescope. However, it is a little-known fact that Galileo was not the first person to invent it. He got the idea for a telescope from Dutch spectacles makers who had invented a spyglass to observe ships. Galileo used the idea to make his own improved telescope with much higher magnification, which he sold to Venetian merchants for spotting ships.
• Galileo said, “Facts, which at first seem improbable, will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty
• In 1610, Galileo was the first astronomer to discover the four moons of Jupiter. These moons were named “Galilean moons” after him. The four moons associated with “Galilean moons” are lo, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The largest of the “Galilean moons” is Ganymede. Thus, he discovered the first moons ever known to orbit a planet other than Earth.
• With his telescopes, Galileo studied the moon, Venus and Jupiter
• Statue of Galileo Galilei, on the facade of the Uffizi gallery. Florence, Tuscany, Italy.
• After 400 years, Galileo’s telescope still survives, and is available in the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Italy. The museum has two telescopes and objective lenses, which were built by Galileo himself.
• It is said that Galileo went blind because he used to observe the sun for long stretches of time while he was looking at sun spots with his telescope.
• He is dubbed “the father of observational astronomy,” “the father of modern physics” and “the father of modern science.
• Albert Einstein said that Galileo was his favorite scientist and distant mentor.

I’ll say it again. If you really get plugged into a place, a university, a museum, or a culture, it WILL transform you. Stop passing through great places and stay awhile. You can give your middle finger to those who disagree with you.