📍Villa Il Gioiello, Via del Pian dei Giullari 42, 50125 Florence, Italy
1631 – 1642“I was born in Pisa, the son of a lute player and music theorist who taught me to question authority and to trust experiment; as a young man I timed the swinging lamps of Pisa cathedral against my own pulse. In 1631 I rented Il Gioiello, a modest villa among the olive groves on the hill of Arcetri, south of Florence, chiefly to be near my eldest daughter Virginia — Sister Maria Celeste — a nun at the convent of San Matteo just three hundred metres down the lane. She had begged me to live close enough that I would not have to ride two hours on a mule to see her. After the Inquisition condemned me in 1633 for teaching that the Earth moves around the Sun, I was sentenced to house arrest here. My beloved daughter was taken by illness only months after I came home, and I was heartbroken. Even after I went blind in 1638, I kept working, finishing my Two New Sciences, on motion and the strength of materials, with young assistants, and receiving visitors, among them the poet John Milton. The villa now belongs to the University of Florence.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today