FLORENCE AND THE GALILEO MUSEUM

OUR MATERIALS APPLICATIONS SCIENTIST, BARNABY LEVIN, DESCRIBES A HIGHLIGHT FROM HIS TRIP TO ITALY IN JANUARY

In January 2020, I had the privilege of representing Direct Electron at the Gordon Research Conference for Liquid Phase Electron Microscopy, which was held at the Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco in Italy. After the conference, I spent a week travelling to visit some of our customers in Germany and the UK.
In between the conference and my customer visits, I had a free weekend to do some sightseeing, and I chose to spend that weekend in the historic Italian city of Florence.

In addition to visiting some of the city’s most famous attractions (The Duomo and Brunelleschi’s famous dome, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the incredible collection of Renaissance and Classical art at the Uffizi Gallery), I made time to visit a slightly less well known museum, but one that offers visitors some fascinating insights into the history of science: The Museo Galileo.
The museum houses a large collection of historic scientific instruments used by Florentine scientists from Galileo Galilei himself, to 19th century scientists such as Giovanni Battista Amici. The museum also explains how these Florentine scientists made important contributions to a wide range of scientific fields, from Astronomy to Medicine. Of particular interest from an Electron Microscopist’s point of view was the Museo Galileo’s collection of historic vacuum instruments. According to the description accompanying this collection, the scientists of Florence’s Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiments) performed some of the earliest experiments to investigate whether it was possible to create a vacuum, demolishing the traditional belief that vacuums couldn’t exist. Today, the ability to create and maintain a vacuum is, of course, fundamental to many technologies, including the Electron Microscope.

In future, I hope to be able to visit Italy again, and learn more about Italy’s contributions to science and culture.

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