This is a biography of the Italian polymath Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642); his life is shown through documents and letters, but especially through the letters written to him by his eldest daughter, who was a nun in a cloistered convent. This was a very good book, and one that I very much was happy to read.
Born in Pisa, and raised in Florence, Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock by his mistress; his son (the youngest of the three) was eventually legitimized, but Galileo felt that finding suitable husbands for his daughters would be impossible, so he placed them in the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, just south of Florence. We know nearly nothing of the younger daughter (born as Livia, and who took the religious name of Sister Arcangela), who appears to have been unsuited to religious life. The elder daughter (born Virginia, with the religious name of Sister Maria Celeste, was a true religious and a very literate devoted daughter to her father. From 1623 to 1634, there are one hundred and twenty of her letters that were saved by her father. In those letters, she goes over his household matters, his scientific work, remedies for his ill health, financial problem in the convent, and prayers for his problems with the Roman Inquisition. Besides her letters to him (all the letters he wrote to her were burned upon her death, as the nuns were terrified at having letters from someone condemned by the Inquisition in the convent), the book is a very good biography of Galileo. His daughter died in 1634, not long after Galileo’s house arrest was adjusted so that he could live at his villa in Arcetri; he died in 1642, and was buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, but not in a noble way, due to objections from Rome. In 1737 a monument had been erected in the Basilica in his honor; when he was exhumed for the re-burial, it was found that Sister Maria Celeste was buried with him, and she was re-buried next to him as well.
This was a book that I very much enjoyed, both as a woman (there are not that many 17th century Italian women that one knows of in a literary way) and as a Catholic.
From The Recamier 