Museo Galileo

In a glass egg-shaped reliquary on the second floor, a bony finger points permanently toward the heavens. It's Galileo Galilei's actual middle finger, removed from his corpse when his body was transferred to its grand tomb in Santa Croce in 1737 — ninety-five years after his death, because the Church had refused him a proper burial for the crime of being right about the solar system. That someone kept his middle finger, of all digits, has not been lost on anyone.

But the finger is just the hook. The Museo Galileo houses one of the world's most important collections of scientific instruments — over 1,000 objects spanning the Medici and Lorraine collections from the 16th to 19th centuries. Galileo's own telescopes are here, including the lens he used in 1610 to discover Jupiter's moons. There are astrolabes of breathtaking beauty, celestial globes, armillary spheres, and early thermometers. The Grand Dukes collected scientific instruments with the same obsessive connoisseurship they applied to paintings.

The museum is housed in the 11th-century Palazzo Castellani, right on the Arno. It sits in the shadow of the Uffizi, which is both its problem and its charm — the art tourists go left, and you go right into a building that's essentially empty. You can spend an unhurried hour examining instruments that literally changed our understanding of the universe.

Florence is rightly famous as the birthplace of the artistic Renaissance, but this museum makes the case that it was equally the birthplace of modern science. Galileo, after all, was a Florentine. His middle finger still makes the point.