The Galilean Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts in Padua is now an EPS Historic Site, in honour of Galileo Galilei.

The plaque unveiling ceremony took place on January 18, 2025, conducted by the President of the European Physical Society (EPS), Prof. Mairi Sakellariadou, and the President of the Academy, Prof. Giovanna Zaniolo, during the annual academic Galilean Day, in the presence of the academicians and of the public (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Unveiling of the plaque. FLTR: Angela Bracco, President of the Italian Physical Society (SIF), Mairi Sakellariadou ,
President of the European Physical Society (EPS) and Giovanna Zaniolo, President of the Accademia Galileiana. Credits Accademia Galileiana.

The event began with an introduction by Prof. Zaniolo, including the reading of congratulatory messages from the Senator Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, Minister for Institutional Reforms and Regulatory Simplification, and the President of the Veneto Region, Luca Zaia. This was followed by a brief explanation by myself of the motivations for the designation (see below), as well as remarks by Prof. Sakellariadou and Prof. Bracco, President of the Italian Physical Society (SIF), on the role of their respective Societies.

Fig. 2: The emblem of the Accademia Galileiana. Credits Accademia Galileiana.

The Academy is the oldest among the scientific ones still active in Italy, having been founded on November 25, 1599, under the name Accademia dei Ricovrati. Its motto, Bipatens animis asylum—inscribed on its emblem (Fig. 2)—is a verse from Boethius, inspired in turn by the allegoric description in Homer’s Odyssey of the Cave of the Naiads, with its two entrances. The motto was chosen to symbolize a refuge for the convergence of contemplative life and active life, between theoretical speculation and practical application.

Fig. 3: “Sala Guariento”, the meeting room of the Accademia. Credits Accademia Galileiana

The ceremony took place in the meeting room of the Accademia (Fig. 3). This, initially the Chapel of the Carrarese Palace, was magnificently decorated by Guariento di Arpo around 1350, one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. At the time, Padua was under the ruling of the Carrarese family, still independent of Venice, that will conquer it in 1405. Born five years after the departure of Giotto from Padua, Guariento dealt with the indelible footprint of the Tuscan genius, while developing an original pictorial language echoing the culture of his city. In the frescoes of the Chapel, he focuses on the divine power, narrating episodes from the Bible. The one in Fig. 4 is from the Book of Daniel, on the Babylonian exile of the Jews. Having three young Jews refused the order of Nebuchadnezzar to worship a statue, the king commanded to hurl them into a fiery furnace, but they were saved by the Angel of the Lord. In the painting, the king appears astonished, above the disordered mass of terrified soldiers, in stark contrast to the solemn calmness of the angel and the three victims, emerging unscathed from the furnace.

Fig. 4: The Three Young Men in the Fiery Furnace, by Guariento di Arpo. Credits Accademia Galileiana

The name of the Accademia was changed to Galileiana in recent years, to celebrate Galileo Galilei as one of its founding members. We read his name in the minutes of the first session on November 25, 1599, the only scientist amongst university professors of law and of philosophy, men of letters, learned nobles and quite a number of ecclesiastics. Some academicians were good friends of  the young Tuscan, having together discussions on a wide range of philosophical and cultural issues, being him versed in music, in drawing and in writing of science, not only opening the way to modern science but also as masterpieces of Italian literature. On the other hand, the fight would become unavoidable with the Paduan philosophers, dogmatic followers of Aristoteles, not able to accept the Galileian discoveries.

Galilei had already been active in the organization of the group since several months. Indeed, on the Ides of August 1599, he had signed a note in the Album amicorum of Thomas Seget, describing himself as “Noble Florentine Mathematician and Professor at the Paduan Academy.” Seget, a Scottish poet then in Veneto and one of the first foreign Ricovrati, would later be in Prague in 1610 with Kepler when the astronomer confirmed the Medicean Stars. There, Seget would compose the famous epigram with the words Vicisti Galileae.

Fig. 5: The trajectory of a projectile; a) asymmetric in Nova scientia by Nicolò Tartaglia in 1537; b) symmetric for Galilei in 1599

In his dedication, Galilei drew a parabola (Fig. 5 b) to illustrate the motion of projectiles, a trajectory he had discovered through an experiment conducted with Guidobaldo del Monte in 1592, the year Galilei arrived in Padua. In his book of motion, Discorsi e dimostrazioni intorno a due nuove scienze, published in 1638, Galilei will describe the experiment: he launched a metal, perfectly spherical, ball on an inclined surface, such that the ball, gently pressing on the surface, would leave a trace of its passage. The experiment is remarkably simple, and revolutionary. Until then, following Aristotle, it was believed that, on Earth, there were only two types of motion: violent and natural, both rectilinear—initially violent in the direction of the cannon's barrel, finally natural, vertically downward toward the Earth's centre, as the initial impetus was exhausted. This was also the case of the most important textbook on the subject, the Nova scientia by the great mathematician Nicolò Tartaglia. Galilei demonstrated that the motion is symmetrical in ascent and descent, entirely of the same type. This marked the beginning of his journey toward discovering the laws of motion, a path he was still following in 1599 and which would lead him to them in 1604.

The text of the plaque, after commemorating Galilei’s contributions, also notes that: “Among the early members of the Ricovrati was Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, elected a member in 1669 and that became the first woman in the world to earn a university degree in 1678. In subsequent centuries, the Academy counted among its members figures such as Benjamin Franklin and John Herschel among foreign scientists, and among Italians Tullio Levi-Civita, Gregorio Ricci Curbastro, Bruno Rossi and Antonio Favaro, who oversaw the monumental National Edition of the Works of Galileo Galilei.