☰Galileo's Daughter

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in 1564, studied medicine at the university, and ran the famous (and probably apocryphal) leaning-tower experiment here. Sobel's biography uses the surviving letters of his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, to reconstruct the man and his Tuscany — the Pisan houses, the university world, the long argument with Rome that ended in his trial for heresy. Excellent on what life felt like in 17th-century Tuscany.