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Il telescopio di Galileo
Questo libro parla di un delitto. E del suo autore, a cui quel crimine costerà molto caro. Tutto accade in poco tempo, tra l'ottobre del 1608 e il gennaio del 1610, quando il cielo che si credeva di conoscere viene distrutto. Il cielo contemplato da Omero e Ovidio, da Aristotele e Tolomeo, da Dante e Tommaso d'Aquino, a un certo punto non esiste più. Anzi, ed è questa la cosa davvero terribile, non è mai esistito. E a fargli violenza, a stravolgere l'idea di rassicurante ordine che da sempre simboleggiava, è un oggetto nato quasi per scherzo, che permette di trascendere i limiti imposti dalla natura ai sensi e alla conoscenza umana. Spesso descritta in modo lineare e al limite della banalità, l'invenzione del telescopio assume qui, grazie anche alla pubblicazione di numerose lettere e documenti d'archivio inediti, i tratti di una storia più complicata e sofferta, dove in primo piano non c'è solo Galileo. Con lui, protagonisti sono matematici, astronomi, filosofi e teologi come Paolo Sarpi, Johannes Kepler e il cardinale Bellarmino, ma anche artigiani, uomini di corte, ambasciatori, nunzi pontifici e sovrani come Rodolfo II, Enrico IV e Giacomo I, insieme a poeti e artisti della levatura di John Donne e Jan Brueghel. Una storia avvincente, raccontata istante per istante, dove la potenza visiva del nuovo strumento fini per incarnare significati che andavano ben oltre la scienza degli astri.
332 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 4, 2014
Interessantissimo; documentato; scritto in modo lineare, affatto accademico o didascalico, tanto da avvincere come un romanzo. L'abiura Galileiana è storia di pubblico dominio; un avvenimento ben presente - pur con cognizione superficiale e spesso ideologizzata - nell'immaginario collettivo. Quanti tuttavia sanno che Galileo non inventò il telescopio, ma perfezionò (con strepitosa caparbietà e geniale intuizione) un'invenzione olandese? Quanti hanno un'idea esatta di cosa realmente accadde nella comunità umana, scientifica, politica, religiosa ..."europea" (ma poi mondiale), alla pubblicazione del Sidereus Nuncius? E quali furono i tempi, rapidissimi per l'epoca, di tale diffusione? Quanti sanno - ad esempio - che al tempo una lettera impiegava quattro anni ad arrivare in Cina? Quali e quante gelosie suscitarono le scoperte documentate dallo scienziato fiorentino? Quali furono la sua ostinazione e la sua ambizione nel perseguire un riconoscimento ufficiale da ogni più alta autorità scientifica, politica e morale del suo tempo? Quali amicizie coltivò, e quali sacrificò, sull'altare della propria ambizione, quando capì che la sua scoperta avrebbe permesso (se non imposto, di fatto) la totale riscrittura della cosmologia; e simultaneamente stravolto scienze, abitudini, equilibri politici, religione, credenze e... percezione dell'Uomo nell'immensità del Creato? Questo libro eccellente porta a conoscenza diffusa lettere, documenti, carteggi, cronologie, disegni, curiosità, costume, fatti e tempi di uno dei più macroscopici stravolgimenti dell'umano sapere. E ha l'infinito pregio della sobrietà. L'eleganza - questa sì - accademica di condurre il lettore fino a un attimo prima degli atti inquisitori che condannarono Galileo e lo costrinsero all'abiura, lasciando poi i successivi quattrocento anni di storia, e di conseguenti scoperte scientifiche, a narratore esatto - e implacabile giudice - di quanto avvenuto dopo.
January 18, 2023
4.5
Fatta eccezione per i libri scritti da Todorov, non mi era mai capitato di dover studiare un libro altrettanto avvincente in vista della preparazione di un esame. Per quanto precisi e accurati, di rado i manuali riescono ad affascinare il lettore; quelli di storia, poi, per forza di cose tendono a privilegiare il dato oggettivo, con una conseguente perdita di fascino. E senza coinvolgimento è più difficile stimolare la memoria. Con questo più che riuscito esperimento, invece, gli autori ci vogliono ricordare che dietro la possente e tentacolare Storia c'è sempre una storia, fatta di eventi, persone, e meccanismi che li legano gli uni agli altri. Quello che ho apprezzato maggiormente di questo volume è proprio l'impostazione volutamente narrativa che segue l'evolversi dei capitoli: in questo modo non solo episodi e personaggi prendono vita, ma gli eventi diventano più comprensibili. In tutto questo, tuttavia, c'è un però. Il romanticismo, quando eccessivo, sconfina nel patetismo, e questo rischia di penalizzare il pregio di un lavoro che è comunque altissimo. Meno pathos in alcuni momenti e meno giudizi di valore che lasciano trapelare una posizione da parte degli autori troppo pendente a favore del nostro eroe copernicano, e il giudizio sarebbe slittato a cinque stelle. Una nota di merito per il capitolo su Praga, che da solo vale la lettura di tutto il volume.
Fatta eccezione per i libri scritti da Todorov, non mi era mai capitato di dover studiare un libro altrettanto avvincente in vista della preparazione di un esame. Per quanto precisi e accurati, di rado i manuali riescono ad affascinare il lettore; quelli di storia, poi, per forza di cose tendono a privilegiare il dato oggettivo, con una conseguente perdita di fascino. E senza coinvolgimento è più difficile stimolare la memoria. Con questo più che riuscito esperimento, invece, gli autori ci vogliono ricordare che dietro la possente e tentacolare Storia c'è sempre una storia, fatta di eventi, persone, e meccanismi che li legano gli uni agli altri. Quello che ho apprezzato maggiormente di questo volume è proprio l'impostazione volutamente narrativa che segue l'evolversi dei capitoli: in questo modo non solo episodi e personaggi prendono vita, ma gli eventi diventano più comprensibili. In tutto questo, tuttavia, c'è un però. Il romanticismo, quando eccessivo, sconfina nel patetismo, e questo rischia di penalizzare il pregio di un lavoro che è comunque altissimo. Meno pathos in alcuni momenti e meno giudizi di valore che lasciano trapelare una posizione da parte degli autori troppo pendente a favore del nostro eroe copernicano, e il giudizio sarebbe slittato a cinque stelle. Una nota di merito per il capitolo su Praga, che da solo vale la lettura di tutto il volume.
March 26, 2015
This was a totally fascinating read but I am giving it four stars grudgingly due to the last chapter. The authors track the arrival of the telescope and its immediate aftermath, most spectacularly its cosmographical implications and how they were revealed and received across Europe from 1608 to 1612. The star of the show, quite rightly, is M. Galileo Galilei. The authors, although clearly partisans of the Great Man, demonstrate Galileo's massive significance and also how the implications of his (and to a lesser extent his contemporaries') discoveries, eclipsed his own achievements.
The authors' bete noire throughout the work is Mario Biagioli, whom they criticize in the main text and snipe at almost obsessively in the footnotes. That's well and good, but the book is totally shaped by Biagioli's themes: Galileo as a self-serving courtier, and as a catalyst of a European transformation of thought for which he required a court position and could play only one of several important roles.
Each chapter traces the reception of the telescope, and Siderius Nuncius (with which to intellectuals it was largely bound up) in a different part of Europe. My personal favorite chapter was the chapter on Paris. In most histories of the period, Peiresc and his entourage are presented as slavish disciples and admirers of Galileo. In fact, the authors show how the the Parisian astronomy group was initially hyper-competitive and even dismissive of Galileo and his achievement. Peiresc fashioned his own telescope and he and his group soon thought they had done a much better job of tracing out Jupiter's moons and their orbits. Peiresc planned to re-dedicate the four Galilean moons, making the Italians share the glory with the French Medicis. The plan was aborted, but not before a frontispiece had been drawn up, which survives and is displayed as one of the plates in the book.
Of course, Peiresc and the Parisian astronomers' ambitions foreshadow those of Simon Marius, who attempted a similar competitive re-dedication of the Jovian moons a few years later, and in the process gave them their modern names. (Marius' observations of Jupiter's moons, which were concurrent with Galileo's, are ignored in the book, although this is reasonable given that his book did not appear until 1614, after the authors' main time frame.) But the obvious takeaway from the authors' trans-national scope is that the cosmographical implications of the telescope were inevitable and did not require a Galileo or a Sarpi to unveil. At the same time, the authors' reconstruction of events demonstrate how good an observer Galileo truly was. It really was a year before anybody( besides probably Marius and his entourage) could match the Venetian telescope group for observational accuracy. This accounts for the spectacular success, the true shock-value, of the Siderius Nuncius.
I recommend this book; nevertheless, my warm feelings were somewhat undone by the last chapter. For the authors, Galileo was not just a great observational astronomer but the first modern physicist. In the introduction, they claim (arguably but not unreasonably) that after 1610 Galileo introduced the first genuinely non-teleological cosmology. Fine, but given that this was the 1610s, such a radical step in itself was more than enough to make Galileo's life pretty difficult, to doom him in Italy. So it's a bit bizarre that in the last chapter the authors start blaming other people for Galileo's problems with the Inquisition: mainly Tommaso Campanella, whose "truly bizarre" cosmology was unfairly tied to Galileo, but also Kepler, who in his Dissertatio cum Siderio Nuncio pointed out the implications of Galileo's discoveries for the theories of Giordano Bruno (and moreover criticized Galileo for not crediting Bruno, which Galileo obviously could not have safely done).
There's simply no evidence that Galileo's problems with the Inquisition had anything at all to do with Campanella's or Kepler's writings. But even if they did, what exactly is the argument here? Let's say Galileo had been luckier or smarter in his Copernican advocacy in Rome, had bided his time and managed to convince the Jesuits and the Vatican to accept Copernican cosmology. You still would have had a theocracy, just a somewhat more scientifically accurate one. This is an improvement on real history only if you think the only important historical criteria are (1) Copernicanism and (2) Galileo's personal glory. The Campanellas of the world can apparently rot in prison forever.
Galileo's eventual personal tragedy at the hands of the Inquisition was pretty mild by the standards of the time -- by the standards even of those endured of Campanella or Kepler! The authors dislike Biagioli for his highly unromantic and un-modern portrait of Galileo, and they wrote a very useful book as a response. But Biagioli's interpretation is actually pretty refreshing compared to one in which Galileo's personal fate is presented as the final arbitrating fact on an entire historical period.
The authors' bete noire throughout the work is Mario Biagioli, whom they criticize in the main text and snipe at almost obsessively in the footnotes. That's well and good, but the book is totally shaped by Biagioli's themes: Galileo as a self-serving courtier, and as a catalyst of a European transformation of thought for which he required a court position and could play only one of several important roles.
Each chapter traces the reception of the telescope, and Siderius Nuncius (with which to intellectuals it was largely bound up) in a different part of Europe. My personal favorite chapter was the chapter on Paris. In most histories of the period, Peiresc and his entourage are presented as slavish disciples and admirers of Galileo. In fact, the authors show how the the Parisian astronomy group was initially hyper-competitive and even dismissive of Galileo and his achievement. Peiresc fashioned his own telescope and he and his group soon thought they had done a much better job of tracing out Jupiter's moons and their orbits. Peiresc planned to re-dedicate the four Galilean moons, making the Italians share the glory with the French Medicis. The plan was aborted, but not before a frontispiece had been drawn up, which survives and is displayed as one of the plates in the book.
Of course, Peiresc and the Parisian astronomers' ambitions foreshadow those of Simon Marius, who attempted a similar competitive re-dedication of the Jovian moons a few years later, and in the process gave them their modern names. (Marius' observations of Jupiter's moons, which were concurrent with Galileo's, are ignored in the book, although this is reasonable given that his book did not appear until 1614, after the authors' main time frame.) But the obvious takeaway from the authors' trans-national scope is that the cosmographical implications of the telescope were inevitable and did not require a Galileo or a Sarpi to unveil. At the same time, the authors' reconstruction of events demonstrate how good an observer Galileo truly was. It really was a year before anybody( besides probably Marius and his entourage) could match the Venetian telescope group for observational accuracy. This accounts for the spectacular success, the true shock-value, of the Siderius Nuncius.
I recommend this book; nevertheless, my warm feelings were somewhat undone by the last chapter. For the authors, Galileo was not just a great observational astronomer but the first modern physicist. In the introduction, they claim (arguably but not unreasonably) that after 1610 Galileo introduced the first genuinely non-teleological cosmology. Fine, but given that this was the 1610s, such a radical step in itself was more than enough to make Galileo's life pretty difficult, to doom him in Italy. So it's a bit bizarre that in the last chapter the authors start blaming other people for Galileo's problems with the Inquisition: mainly Tommaso Campanella, whose "truly bizarre" cosmology was unfairly tied to Galileo, but also Kepler, who in his Dissertatio cum Siderio Nuncio pointed out the implications of Galileo's discoveries for the theories of Giordano Bruno (and moreover criticized Galileo for not crediting Bruno, which Galileo obviously could not have safely done).
There's simply no evidence that Galileo's problems with the Inquisition had anything at all to do with Campanella's or Kepler's writings. But even if they did, what exactly is the argument here? Let's say Galileo had been luckier or smarter in his Copernican advocacy in Rome, had bided his time and managed to convince the Jesuits and the Vatican to accept Copernican cosmology. You still would have had a theocracy, just a somewhat more scientifically accurate one. This is an improvement on real history only if you think the only important historical criteria are (1) Copernicanism and (2) Galileo's personal glory. The Campanellas of the world can apparently rot in prison forever.
Galileo's eventual personal tragedy at the hands of the Inquisition was pretty mild by the standards of the time -- by the standards even of those endured of Campanella or Kepler! The authors dislike Biagioli for his highly unromantic and un-modern portrait of Galileo, and they wrote a very useful book as a response. But Biagioli's interpretation is actually pretty refreshing compared to one in which Galileo's personal fate is presented as the final arbitrating fact on an entire historical period.
April 10, 2023
Sicuramente scritto benissimo, fa capire l'importanza della scoperta del telescopio, non solo come strumento scientifico ma anche come rivoluzione culturale.
Solo su una cosa ho forti dubbi: gli autori non fanno altro che sottolineare la pompa, la superbia e il generale brutto carattere di Galileo - suffragato da numerosissime fonti - ma non accettano il "Galileo cortigiano" di Biagioli, che semplicemente tira le fila del discorso nello stesso senso di opportunismo politico e umano (perché, diciamolo, G. era una personcina non proprio gestibilissima). Francamente mi sembra una scelta un po' bizzarra.
Solo su una cosa ho forti dubbi: gli autori non fanno altro che sottolineare la pompa, la superbia e il generale brutto carattere di Galileo - suffragato da numerosissime fonti - ma non accettano il "Galileo cortigiano" di Biagioli, che semplicemente tira le fila del discorso nello stesso senso di opportunismo politico e umano (perché, diciamolo, G. era una personcina non proprio gestibilissima). Francamente mi sembra una scelta un po' bizzarra.
August 2, 2019
Very interesting book. A detailed approach (many times too detailed, for each page he needed he wrote two), a vivid description of the Galileo, the telescope and the world arround them, as well as the political and theological complications that folliwed the discoveries of the "new skies."
July 28, 2025
This started out very strong, but by the last third the narrative starts to blur into a string of names and contemporaneous quotations that don't really point to much. The author does a decent job of trying to lay out all the raw material and then stitch it together in the last chapter and the epilogue, but by then it's all a bit too late, and it's hard to know what the actual goal was - it feels like they wanted to go for something more controversial and illuminating than reinforcing common knowledge about Galileo which they eventually created. There seems to be a motion at getting into the motivations of Galileo's detractors, and how he seems to have missed the danger he was putting himself in, but each detractor is treated somewhat superficially, and the text itself gets hard to slog through. A worthwhile history that gets lost in the weeds and then finds the path to the same conclusion everyone else already arrived at.
June 10, 2015
A disappointing, dry academic description of Galileo's advancements with the telescope and it's impact on our understanding of the solar system. It pits advancement in technology against religious dogma.
Galileo had three things that lead to the great advancement.
The first was the technical advancement in creating a more powerful telescope. Telescopes were stuck at 8x magnification. Technology lacked the understanding of how lenses worked and the skill to create better lenses. Galileo was able to advance the magnification up to 20x and still have a clear image.
With that technology, Galileo also found things in the night sky that challenged the earth-centric view of the universe based on biblical dogma. One was features in the moon. It had mountains and features like Earth. The other was "planets" near Jupiter that followed Jupiter in the sky.
The third was the scientific discipline to track the "planets" near Jupiter from night to night. By tracking the movement, he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter. They were moons, just as Earth had a moon.
That lead to the conflict the religious dogma that the Earth was unique and the center of the Universe. Others had observed that Venus had phases, indicating that it was orbiting the sun, not the Earth.
The mechanical advancement in lens technology lead to the greater advancement in how man resides in the universe.
Galileo had three things that lead to the great advancement.
The first was the technical advancement in creating a more powerful telescope. Telescopes were stuck at 8x magnification. Technology lacked the understanding of how lenses worked and the skill to create better lenses. Galileo was able to advance the magnification up to 20x and still have a clear image.
With that technology, Galileo also found things in the night sky that challenged the earth-centric view of the universe based on biblical dogma. One was features in the moon. It had mountains and features like Earth. The other was "planets" near Jupiter that followed Jupiter in the sky.
The third was the scientific discipline to track the "planets" near Jupiter from night to night. By tracking the movement, he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter. They were moons, just as Earth had a moon.
That lead to the conflict the religious dogma that the Earth was unique and the center of the Universe. Others had observed that Venus had phases, indicating that it was orbiting the sun, not the Earth.
The mechanical advancement in lens technology lead to the greater advancement in how man resides in the universe.
July 8, 2017
Galileo's Telescope was to put it simply, an introduction for me to this specific history, so being without much more than the basic knowledge, my opinion on the accuracy of this book must be taken with a grain of salt.
But all and all it appeared to be accurate, more than a few viewpoints were explored throughout the book - both for and against Galileo so in that sense it was without bias. As much as it can be.
My only real problem with this book is I found the transitions between topics and viewpoints to be non-existent and I suddenly found myself reading about another person whom had only be introduced briefly before. And because of that I found some chapters harder to get through than others, leaving it with 3 stars.
I, however, don't regret this read at all with what I've learned from it.
But all and all it appeared to be accurate, more than a few viewpoints were explored throughout the book - both for and against Galileo so in that sense it was without bias. As much as it can be.
My only real problem with this book is I found the transitions between topics and viewpoints to be non-existent and I suddenly found myself reading about another person whom had only be introduced briefly before. And because of that I found some chapters harder to get through than others, leaving it with 3 stars.
I, however, don't regret this read at all with what I've learned from it.
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