Galileo's Dream (11 page)

I may perhaps seem rash in accepting your claims so readily with no support from my own experience. But why should I not believe a most learned mathematician, whose very style attests to the soundness of his judgment? He has no intention of practicing deception in a bid for vulgar publicity, nor does he pretend to have seen what he has not seen. Because he loves the truth, he does not hesitate to oppose even the most familiar opinions, and to bear the jeers of the crowd with equanimity.

They feel insufferable heat. Perhaps they lack stone for erecting shelters against the sun. On the other hand, maybe they have a soil as sticky as clay. Their usual building plan, accordingly, is as follows. Digging up huge fields, they carry out the earth and heap it in a circle, perhaps for the purpose of drawing out the moisture down below. In this way, they may hide in the deep shade behind their excavated mounds and, in keeping with the sun's motion, shift about inside, clinging to the shadow. They have, as it were, a sort of underground city. They make their homes in numerous caves hewn out of that circular embankment. They place their fields and pastures in the middle, to avoid being forced to go too far away from their farms in their flight from the sun.

—must be very happy to behold this wonderfully varied display. The conclusion is quite clear. Our moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reason we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited
.

G
ALILEO'S RETURN TO
F
LORENCE
, as he was now calling his decision, continued to draw fire in Venice and Padua. Priuli was now terming it a breach of contract as well as a personal betrayal, suggesting to the Doge that it would be appropriate to ask for some salary to be returned.

With the mood turning so hard against him, it was a great comfort to know that Fra Paolo Sarpi would remain as steadfast a friend and supporter as he had always been. Galileo had referred to him as “father and master” in his letters to him for many years. Having Sarpi on his side was important.

One day, Sarpi was passing through Padua and dropped by the Via Vignali to visit Galileo and see how his combustible friend was doing. He brought with him a letter to Galileo from their mutual friend Sagredo, who was returning from Syria and had found out by mail about Galileo's decision to move to Florence. Sagredo, concerned, had written;
Who can invent a visario which can tell the crazy person from the sane, the good neighbor from the bad?

Sarpi, it quickly became clear, felt much the same. Galileo sat down
with him on the back terrace overlooking the garden, by a table of fruit and some jugs of new wine. Relaxing in this little hole in the city under the stucco walls surrounding them was something they had done many times before, for Sarpi was no ordinary priestly mentor. Like Galileo, he was a philosopher, and he had made investigations of his own in the same years Galileo had worked on mechanics, and found things such as the little valves inside human veins, and the oscillations of the pupil, and the polar attraction of magnets. Galileo had helped him with this last, and Sarpi had helped Galileo with his military compass, and even with the laws of motion.

Now the great Servite drank deeply, put his feet up, and sighed. “I'm very sorry to see you go. Things won't be the same around here, and that's the truth. I'll hope for the best, but like Francesco, I'm concerned about your long-term welfare. In Venice you would have always been protected from Rome.”

Galileo shrugged. “I have to be able to do my work,” he insisted.

Sarpi's point made him uneasy, nevertheless. No one had better reason to worry about protection from Rome than Sarpi; the evidence of that was right there in Sarpi's horribly scarred face. Sarpi himself touched his wounds, and smiled his disfigured smile. “You know my joke,” he reminded Galileo. “I recognize the curial style”—
style
meaning also a kind of stiletto.

It was all part of the ongoing war between Venice and the Vatican, which was partly a public war of words—a matter of curses and imprecations so angry that at one point Pope Paul V had excommunicated the entire population of the Serenissima—but also at the same time a silent nighttime war, a vicious thing of knives and drownings. Leonardo Dona had been elected doge precisely because he was a notorious anti-Romanist, and Dona had appointed Sarpi to be his principal counselor. Then Sarpi had announced to the world his intent to write a full history of the Council of Trent, using as source material the secret files of the Venetian representatives to the Council, which were certain to contain many ugly revelations about the Vatican's desperate campaign in the previous century to stem the tide of Protestantism. An exposé, in short. When Paul learned of Sarpi's project, he had been so alarmed and outraged that he had authorized Sarpi's assassination. Killers were sent to Venice, but the Venetian government had many spies in Rome, and they heard in advance that the assassins
were coming, with some of them even identified by name. The Venetian authorities had arrested them on their appearance on the docks, and thrown them into prison.

After that Sarpi had accepted a bodyguard, a man who was to stay with him at all times and sleep on his doorstep.

Some of those involved in the matter were not convinced that a single bodyguard would be enough. They thought more needed to be done to protect him, because Sarpi was more important than he knew; much depended on him. As it turned out these people were proved right, so it was fortunate other protective measures were taken.

The attack on him took place on the night of October 7, 1607. A fire broke out near Santa Maria Formosa, the big church just north of San Marco. Whether the fire was set for this purpose or not, Sarpi's fool of a bodyguard left his post at the Signoria to go have a look at it. When Sarpi was done with his business, he waited for a while for the man, then left for the Servite monastery accompanied by only an elderly servant and an old Venetian senator. He took his usual route home, which anyone could have determined by watching him for even a week: north on the Merceria, past the Rialto and Sagredo's palazzo to the Campo di Santa Fosca. Then north over the Ponte della Pugna, the Bridge of Wrestlers, a narrow stepped bridge over the Rio de' Servi, near the Servite monastery, where Sarpi slept in a simple monk's cell.

They jumped him on the other side of the bridge, five of them, stabbing his companions first and then chasing Sarpi down the Calle Zancani. When they caught him they smashed him to the ground and stabbed him, but it took only a couple of seconds, then they were off into the night. Later we counted fifteen wounds.

Trailing at a discreet distance as we had been, we could only shriek and race over the bridge and kneel by the old man, applying pressure to the cuts as we found them in the flickering torchlight. The stiletto left in his right temple had apparently bent on his upper jawbone and then reemerged from his right cheek. That wound by itself looked fatal.

But for the moment he was still alive, his breath rapid and shallow, failing fast. Women were screaming from the windows overlooking the bridge, shouting directions for the pursuit of the cutthroats. Very
soon we would be joined by others; already people were on the bridge calling out. But it was very dark despite the torches, so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him. Then all we could do was help to lift him up, and to carry him as gently as possible to his monastery.

There in his bare stone room he lay hovering on the edge of death, not just that night but for the next three weeks. Acquapendente came over from Padua and watched over him night and day; we could only apply antibiotics when the great doctor slept. He worried that the stiletto had been poisoned, and tried to determine whether it had been by having it stuck into a chicken and then a dog. The animals survived; and Sarpi survived too. We slipped back into our roles.

So now Sarpi could sit with Galileo, and warn him, with an ironic smile given an extra twist by his scars: “Rome can be dangerous.”

“Yes yes.” Galileo nodded unhappily. He had visited Sarpi often as he hovered between life and death. He had even helped Acquapendente to extract the stiletto from him. The pink scars were still livid. They both knew that Pope Paul had given the assailants a pension to reward them, even though they had been unsuccessful, which Galileo and Sarpi had found funny. Of course, what Sarpi was pointing out now was true: Florence was under the thumb of Rome in a way Venice had never been. If Galileo ever offended the Church, as seemed quite possible, given his new astronomical discoveries and some priestly objections to them, not to mention Kepler's ravings—then Florence might not be far enough away from the long reach of the Dogs of God.

“I know,” Galileo said. But he was already committed to the move, and Sarpi's example cut both ways, so to speak. Florence was an ally of Rome's, Venice a fierce opponent, excommunicated en masse. Moving to Florence might give him some cover.

Sarpi seemed to read these thoughts on his face. “A patron is never as secure as a contract with the senate,” he said. “You know what always happens to a patron's favored ones: they fall. Sooner or later it always happens.”

“Yes yes.” They had both read their Machiavelli and Castiglione, and the fall of the favorite was a standard trope in poetry and song. It
was one of the ways that patrons showed their power, and stirred the pot, and kept those on the rise hopeful.

“So that's another way you will not be as safe.”

“I know. But I have to be able to do my work. I have to be able to make ends meet. Neither has been possible for me in Padua. The senate could have made it possible, but they didn't. They paid me poorly, and the workload was excessive. And they were never going to pay me just to do my own work.”

“No.” Sarpi smiled at him affectionately. “You need a patron to be able to get money without working for it.”

“I work hard!”

“I know you do.”

“And it will be useful work, both to Cosimo and everyone.”

“I know it will. I want you to do your work, you know that. May God bless you for it; I'm sure He will. But you will have to take care what you say.”

“I know.”

Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed. People were always giving in to his superior logic and his intense style of disputation. In debate he was boastful and sarcastic, funny and smart—really smart, in that he was not just quick, but penetrating. No one liked arguing with Galileo.

But with Sarpi it was not like that. Up until this point in Galileo's life, Sarpi himself had been a kind of patron to him, but also much more: a mentor, a confessor, a fellow scientist, a father figure. And now, even when Galileo was leaving Sarpi's beloved Venice, a close friend. His scarred face, ruined by the pope's murderous functionaries, held now an expression of grave concern, and of love and indulgent affection—
amorevolezza
. He did not agree with Galileo, but he was proud of him. It was the look you wanted your father to have when he looked at you. It could not be gainsaid. Galileo could only bow his head and dash the tears from his eyes. For he had to go.

So, after months of preparations, Galileo moved to Florence, leaving behind not only Marina and little Vincenzio, but also all his private
students, and most of the servants and artisans as well, even Mazzoleni and his family. “I won't be needing a workshop anymore,” Galileo explained brusquely. “I'm a philosopher now.” This sounded so ridiculous that he added, “The grand duke's mechanicians will be available to me, if I need anything.”

No more compasses, in other words. No more Padua. He was saying good-bye to all of it, and didn't want any part coming with him. “You can keep making the compasses here,” he told Mazzoleni, then turned his back and left the workshop. The compasses were what Mazzoleni had been hired to manufacture in the first place. They wouldn't sell very well without the course Galileo gave in their use, but there were some instruction manuals left, and it was better than nothing. Besides, there was artisanal work all over Padua.

So the big house on Via Vignali was emptied, its people dispersed. One day in the fall it was handed back over to the landlord, and that whole little world was gone.

In Florence, Galileo had hastily rented a house that was a bit too near the Arno, but it had a little roof terrace for his night viewing—what the Venetians called an
altana
—and he figured he could find a more suitable establishment later. And a new acquaintance, a beautiful young Florentine nobleman named Filippo Salviati, assured him that during the year of his lease he could spend as much time as he liked at Salviati's palazzo in town and at his villa, the Villa delle Selve, in the hills west of Florence. Galileo was pleased. He found the river vapors in Florence unpleasant, also the nearby presence of his mother. Since his father's death, he had kept the old washtub in a house he rented in a poor part of the city, but he never visited her, and didn't want to now. Better to spend his time out at Salviati's, writing books and discussing philosophical matters with his new friend and his friend's circle of acquaintances—men of high quality. When Cosimo wanted him, he could ride into the city quickly, and there would be no need to avoid his mother, or to fear running into her by accident.

Fra Paolo, who knew of this fear, had suggested that Galileo try to effect a reconciliation with her, but he didn't know the half of it; indeed, he didn't know the hundredth part of it. Galileo had recently gotten a letter from her welcoming him back to “his hometown,” and
asking him to drop by and visit her, who was so lonely for him. Galileo snorted as he read this; along with everything else stuck in his memory in his pincushion of a brain, there was something new to add. In their departure from Via Vignali the cook had found a letter left behind by a servant she had fired, one Alessandro Piersanti, who had earlier worked in Florence for the old firedog. Giulia had written to him;

Since your master is so ungrateful to you and to everyone, and as he has so many lenses, you could very easily take three or four and put them at the bottom of a small box, and fill it up with Acquapendente's pills, and then send it to me
. Then, she went on, she would sell them and share the proceeds with him.

“Jesus Christ!” Galileo had shouted. “Thief on the cross!” He had thrown the letter down in disgust. Then he picked it up and saved it in his files, just in case it might be useful someday. It was dated January 9 of that year—which meant that the very week that Galileo was discovering the Medicean Stars and changing the skies forever, his own mother was conspiring to steal his spyglass lenses out of his house and sell them for her own profit. “Jesus son of Mary. Why not just steal the eyes out of my head?”

That was his mother for you. Giulia Galilei, suborner of servants, thief of the heart of his work. He would reside out at Salviati's villa as much as he could.

Though exhausted by the move and the many sleepless nights that year, he still stayed out every clear night, looking at the stars and keeping track of Jupiter's four moons. The Florentine nights were at first smokier than in Padua, but as the fall of his
anno mirabilis
moved toward winter, they turned cold enough to clarify the air. In December one of his former students, Benedetto Castelli, now a priest, wrote to suggest that if the Copernican explanation were indeed correct, then Venus was orbiting the sun also, in an orbit closer to the sun than Earth's, so that one might therefore be able through an occhialino to see it go through phases like the moon's, as one would be seeing either the side facing the sun or the dark side, or in between.