📍Kepler-Museum, Keplergasse 2, 71263 Weil der Stadt, Germany
1571 – 1576“I was born in Weil der Stadt in December 1571, a small walled Free Imperial City in the hills west of Stuttgart, with a market square, a great Catholic church and a few thousand people. My family had once been respected here; my grandfather Sebald had served as the town's mayor. But by the time I arrived the family fortunes were in decline. My father, Heinrich, was a restless mercenary soldier who was often away at the wars, and my mother, Katharina, an innkeeper's daughter, knew a great deal about herbs and remedies. We lived in my grandfather's crowded house, a Lutheran family in a Catholic town, and it was not a peaceful home. I was born early and was a sickly child. Smallpox, caught when I was small, left my eyesight weak and my hands clumsy, so that I could never be a fine observer of the sky. Yet my mother made sure I saw its wonders. When I was about six, after we had moved to nearby Leonberg, she took me up a hill at night to see the Great Comet of 1577, and a few years later my father called me outside to watch the Moon turn red in an eclipse. I never forgot either. My quick mind won me places in the Lutheran schools of Württemberg and then the university at Tübingen, where I met the ideas of Copernicus. I went on to discover the laws by which the planets move around the Sun. Weil der Stadt has never forgotten its son: my statue stands in the market square, and the house on the site of my birth is now the Kepler Museum.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today