Galileo's middle finger was cut off 95 years after he died, and you can still see it in Florence

In a glass case at the Museo Galileo in Florence stands one of the strangest objects in any science museum: the middle finger of Galileo Galilei's right hand. It was cut from his body on March 12, 1737, 95 years after his death, and it has been on public display, in one place or another, for most of the time since.

The story starts with an awkward burial. Galileo died on January 8, 1642, at his home in Arcetri, near Florence, still serving the sentence the Church had imposed on him in 1633 for defending the idea that Earth moves around the Sun. According to Britannica, he spent those last years under house arrest. Because he had been condemned for "vehement suspicion of heresy," church authorities warned the Grand Duke of Tuscany that a grand monument would be inappropriate.

So the most famous scientist in Italy was buried almost in secret. His remains went into a small room next to the novices' chapel of the Basilica of Santa Croce, with no monument to mark the spot. His last pupil, Vincenzo Viviani, spent decades campaigning for a proper tomb and even left money for it in his will, but he died in 1703 without seeing it built.

The change came under Gian Gastone de' Medici, the last Medici ruler of Tuscany. According to the Museo Galileo, the new marble tomb was inaugurated in 1737, and it received the remains of both Galileo and Viviani. It still stands in the left aisle of Santa Croce, directly opposite the tomb of Michelangelo.

The transfer was carried out by a small commission of Florentine scholars, including the physician Antonio Cocchi, the naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, the poet Giovanni Vincenzo Capponi and the antiquarian Anton Francesco Gori. When the coffin was opened, some of them took souvenirs. The museum's own account lists three fingers from the right hand (the thumb, the index finger and the middle finger), the fifth vertebra and a tooth.

Gori kept the middle finger. It later passed to the scholar Angelo Maria Bandini and was exhibited for years at the Laurentian Library in Florence. In 1841 it moved to the newly opened Tribuna di Galileo, and in 1927 it entered the Museum of the History of Science, today the Museo Galileo. The finger stands upright in a glass vessel on a marble base, a display about 44.5 centimeters tall, and the base carries a commemorative Latin inscription by the astronomer Tommaso Perelli.

The vertebra had a separate journey. Taken by Cocchi, it changed hands several times until it reached the physician Domenico Thiene in 1820. On August 2, 1823, Thiene gave it to the University of Padua, where Galileo had taught mathematics from 1592 to 1610. Studies of the bone found only slight signs of arthritis.

The other relics vanished. Capponi had taken the thumb, the index finger and the tooth, and their trail was documented until 1905, when they disappeared. In 2009 they turned up at an auction inside an 18th century glass vase, in a wooden case topped by a small bust of Galileo, sold as an unidentified lot. The Florence collector Alberto Bruschi bought it, researched it, and museum experts confirmed it was the missing set.

Since June 2010 all three fingers and the tooth have been shown together in Florence. The museum's director at the time, Paolo Galluzzi, told The New York Times that Galileo is "a secular saint, and relics are an important symbol of his fight for freedom of thought."

Sources: Museo Galileo: Middle finger of Galileo's right hand; Museo Galileo: Monumental tomb of Galileo; Museo Galileo: New relics of Galileo found (2009); Opera di Santa Croce; University of Padua; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Reuters (2010); The New York Times (2010). Cover: Middle finger of Galileo's right hand at the Museo Galileo, photo by Zde.