“There is a Sienese and a Florentine who gang up on a Pisan…” What might sound like the opening line of a joke or local, campanilistic banter is in fact an alternative way of telling the story of the Galileo affair. Much has been written about this historical episode, yet one detail is almost never pointed out: all 3 of its main protagonists were Tuscan.

First comes Galileo himself. Born in Pisa in 1564, after completing his studies he obtained the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa and later moved to Padua, attracted by the chance to triple his salary. Even so, the Veneto never truly suited him, and at the first chance he returned to Tuscany. In 1610 he was summoned to Florence by the Medici to serve as court mathematician and astronomer. It was in Florence that he began to run into trouble, as he attempted to demonstrate the truth of the Copernican theory, which until then had been taught only as a convenient hypothesis for performing calculations.

The next Tuscan involved was Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, a native of Montepulciano, near Siena. Admitted to the Jesuit order, he became one of its most formidable theologians and polemicists. Bellarmine embodied the most conservative wing of the Church at the time. He held that theology was the queen of the sciences and that all other disciplines were subordinate to it, and he tended to interpret the Scriptures literally. Galileo was not his first illustrious victim: as early as 1599 he had played a role in the condemnation of Giordano Bruno. In 1616, after summoning Galileo to Rome, Bellarmine ordered him to stop defending Copernicanism as a physical truth. He died a few years later, in 1621.

The last Tuscan protagonist was a pope: Maffeo Barberini. Born into a noble Florentine family, he was elected pontiff in 1623, under the name Urban VIII. His pontificate was marked by the patronage of artists, writers, and scientists. This climate encouraged Galileo to believe he could again try, despite the earlier prohibition, to prove the Copernican theory. In 1632 he published, in the Florentine vernacular, his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It was a big mistake. Urban VIII flew into a rage, convinced that Galileo was mocking him by placing the Aristotelian doctrines he favored in the mouth of Simplicio, a foolish character in the Dialogue.

In 1632, the pope summoned Galileo to Rome, had him tried, and forced him to abjure. He was granted the possibility of serving his sentence under house arrest, spending the final years of his life in a villa in Arcetri, in his beloved Tuscany.