Wonderful Museum Pieces

Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display! Start selling the tickets and lining up!

Three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed from the astronomer's body by admirers in 1737, 95 years after his death, as his remains were being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb — opposite that of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. Apparently, "admirers" is the common language usage of the more specific term "corpse mutilator", but not "grave robber". One of the fingers was recovered soon afterward and is now part of the collection of the Museum of the History of Science, in Florence. The vertebra has been kept at the University of Padua, where Galileo taught for years. Neither is being done in any accordance with his wishes, but you have to think that if he had some, it would not be to send his body parts all over Italy.

The recovered tooth and two fingers from the scientist's right hand — the thumb and middle finger — were kept by one of the admirers, an Italian marquis, and later enclosed in a container that was passed on from generation to generation in the same family. "But with time, the generations lost knowledge of what was actually inside the container," and the family sold it, museum officials said. By 1905, all traces of the relics had disappeared, "leading scholars to hypothesize that these singular specimens had been definitely lost". If you can't remember what in those boxes in the garage, how the hell can you expect to know whose body parts are in your jar after a century.

The container recently turned up at auction and was purchased by a private collector, intrigued by the contents but not sure they were Galileo's relics. The buyer eventually contacted Florence culture officials, who used detailed historical documents, as well as documentation from the family that had owned it for so long, to conclude that the fingers and tooth were Galileo's. The relics were inside an 18th-century blown-glass vase, which in turn was inside a wooden case topped with a wooden bust of Galileo. That's probably the easiest way to have identified the parts.

Galileo, as you recall, was condemned by the Vatican for saying the Earth revolved around the Sun back in the early 1600s. Church teaching at the time held that the Earth was the center of the universe. In the early 1990s, Pope John Paul II rehabilitated him, saying the church had erred. who knows, maybe Mussolini's bits and pieces will be forgiven and a big deal in three hundred years!