Museo Galileo

Museum Florence, Italy

The Galileo Museum (formerly the Institute and Museum of the History of Science) in Florence is located in Piazza dei Giudici, in the Palazzo Castellani, a building of very ancient origins (late 11th century). The Museo Galileo holds one of the most important collections of scientific instruments in the world, material testimony of the importance attributed to science and its protagonists by the members of the Medici dynasty and the Lorraine grand dukes.

Museo Galileo owns one of the world’s major collection of scientific instruments, which bears evidence of the crucial role that the Medici and Lorraine Grand Dukes attached to science and scientists. The Museo di Storia della Scienza re-opened to the public under the new name Museo Galileo on June 10, 2010, after a two-year closure due to important redesigning and renovation works. It was inaugurated just four hundred years after the publication in March 1610 of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), the booklet that revolutionized mankind’s conception of the universe, decisively contributing to the advent of modern science.