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Galileo Museum Tour with Santa Croce

Learn how the Medici family's patronage contributed to scientific discovery
From US$420 privately
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Tour Details
Duration
3 hours
Product Type
Tour
Venues
  • Museo Galileo
  • Basilica of Santa Croce - Pazzi Chapel
Photos & Highlights
  • Focus on the growth of scientific progress and humanism during the Renaissance
  • Led by a social or art historian
Select a date
Tour Description
The rule of the Medici family in Renaissance-era Florence led to an explosion of scientific progress and the rise of humanism. This Galileo and science in Renaissance Florence tour, led by a social or art historian, will introduce you to sites around the city, including the Galileo Museum, that stand as testament to this era of intellectual progress. The Medicis Cosimo I and Ferdinand I were fervent patrons of the sciences, especially astronomy. Under their rule, Florence became a shining beacon for experimentation, which the Roman church was frantically trying to suppress with the Inquisition. At the same time, humanism, stemming from the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, was a new way of thinking about a man’s place in the world, and became a recurring theme in Renaissance literature, art and society.

Galileo Museum Florence Tour

We begin our walk at the Museo Galileo, where the most important Medicean collections of scientific instruments are preserved (for more on the great family, see our Florence Medici tour). The greatest among these collections include some of the original instruments that Galileo Galilei, one of the most outstanding figures of the scientific revolution, used for his groundbreaking experiments. Our encounter with Galileo will shed some light on the Medicean systems of patronage, and on the way in which scientists shaped their own image inside a court.

Hitting the Streets

After visiting the museum, we will head to the center of town in order to trace the role of humanism in Renaissance Florence; be it through the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, a discussion of the drastic changes in the art of the period, or of the growing interest in the study of the traditional liberal arts.

To further explore the life of the great author, try our Dante Tour.

Take Aways

This walk is intended, in true humanist ideology, to present an in-depth and well-rounded view of these groundbreaking intellectual developments and the various Florentine characters who played a large role in spurring on this change.

If you are interested in further exploring Renaissance-era Florence, you will enjoy our Renaissance Tour Florence, a look at the daily lives of average Florentines during the era.

Where You'll Start
97 Reviews (4.5)

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Martino was well informed, well read and absolutely delightful!
We truly appreciated our guide - his friendliness, his knowledge of the history of Florence, his abiding interest in Italy, and his earnest desire to satisfy our curiosity on the science tour of Florence. However, I think Context really needs to reconsider this whole tour. There’s just not enough to see to make it a Context-worthy tour, and we consdered it to have fallen very far below the standards of a Context tour, as witnessed in our Ancient Rome tour with Dimo. The guide for a tour about science has to have a strong understanding of science. They must be able to illuminate scientific information in an intriguing way, and to be able to index what we see on the tour to an underlying theme that is more developed than “science flourished in the Renaissance.” Instead our guide seemed to meander through exhibits that he didn’t know very well and had no organizing principle or timeline to talk us through. We could have learned so much more by reading the plaques in the exhibit, and walking ourselves over to Santa Croce to see Galileo’s tomb. We felt like we paid a premium premium price for what was lower quality than a standard museum docent tour, and we are very disappointed with our experience. We fully expect that our guide is a good guide on *other* tours in Florence, and so although he ultimately may bear the brunt of a negative review, we do consider his placement as a guide on this tour to have been a bad decision on Context's part.
We were expecting more from the museum.