“And God would not lie to us!” This was what he said over and over, from the very first moment of the controversy, when out in the workshop he had shouted it while striking the anvil with a long pair of tongs. “God would not lie to us!”
This was logically and perhaps even theologically sound, but it didn’t matter. The attacks continued, and many of them sounded like the kind of thing that might be accompanied by a secret denunciation to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. There were rumors that had already happened.
Galileo kept defending himself, in print and in person, but he fell ill more and more often, with rheumatism, bleeding hernias, shaking spells, blinding headaches, insomnia, syncopes and catalepsies, hypochondria, and bouts of irrational fear. Whenever he was healthy, he begged Cosimo’s secretary Curzio Picchena to be allowed to go to Rome so he could defend himself. He was still confident he could demonstrate the truth of the Copernican hypothesis to anyone he spoke to in person. Picchena was not the only one who doubted this. Winning all those banquet debates had apparently caused Galileo to think that argument was how things were settled in the world. Unfortunately this is never how it happens.
Galileo also was ignoring new complications that mattered. The general of the Jesuits, Claudio Aquaviva, had ordered his people to teach only the Aristotelian philosophy. Then also there was a doctored copy of Galileo’s “Letter to Castelli” being passed around Rome that made his positions sound even more radical than they were.
Worst of all, it was said that Bellarmino had recently ordered an investigation of the Copernican position as put forth by Galileo. This was a secret investigation, but everyone knew about it. A trial had therefore begun—a secret trial that was not actually secret. That was the Inquisition for you; rumors were part of their method, part of their terror. Sometimes they liked to apply pressures that might cause a panicked mistake.
Galileo fell ill again, very conveniently. He took to his bed for most of the winter, miserable and sleepless. In Rome Cesi made inquiries on his behalf to Bellarmino himself, asking what His Eminence thought Galileo should do. Bellarmino told Cesi that Galileo should stick to mathematics, avoid any assertions about the nature of the world, and avoid in particular any scriptural interpretations.
“Happy to do so!” Galileo shouted hoarsely from his bed, shaking Cesi’s fisted letter at his servants. “But how? How can I do that, when these ignorant vipers use Scripture to attack me? If I can’t reply in kind then I can’t defend myself!”
Which was of course the point. They had him. Being thus garotted in a double bind, naturally he choked on it. His stomach too went bad, and he could keep nothing down. He had to remain in his bed. His fear and anger were palpable, a sweaty stink that filled his room. Broken crockery littered the floor, and one had to step carefully to serve him, toe the shards aside and pretend everything was fine, even while dodging things thrown at one. We all knew things were not fine.
“I have to go to Rome,” he would say, repeating it like a rosary. “I have to go to Rome. I must go.” At night, watching the moons of Jupiter, taking notes as he hummed one of his father’s old tunes, falling asleep on his stool, he would murmur: “Help me, help me, help me. Get me to Rome.”
Finally Cosimo approved the visit. He wrote to his Roman ambassador to say that Galileo was coming to defend himself against the accusations of his rivals. The ambassador was to provide Galileo with two rooms in the Villa Medici, because he needs peace and quiet on account of his poor health.
Guicciardini, that same ambassador who had taken over during Galileo’s last stay in Rome, was still unimpressed by the astronomer. He wrote back to Cosimo, I do not know whether he has changed his theories or his disposition, but I know this: certain Dominican friars who play a major role in the Holy Office, and others, are ill disposed toward him. This is no place to come and argue about the Moon and, especially in these times, arrive with new ideas.
And yet that’s what he did. A ducal litter carried him south to Rome as before, and after the arduous week of the journey he came into the city with Federico Cesi, rolling through the ever-more-crowded outskirts of the great city, to the Pincian Hill in the northeast quarter. The hill rose out of squalid warrens crawling with people, all the poor souls who had migrated to the City of God hoping for succor either mundane or supernatural. Now Galileo made one more.
The villa Medici occupied the very top of the Pincian Hill, which was also known as the Hill of Gardens—and deservedly so, as the few villas on it stuck out like ships on a billowing wave of vineyards. The Medici villa was the vast white hulk at the top, with a tall and nearly blank stucco façade facing the city center. Newer galleries extended away from the main building into the great gardens surrounding it, where one could wander among the hedges and the magnificent collection of antiquities that the family had bought from the Capranicas a generation before.
The ambassador, Piero Guicciardini, met Galileo on the broad front terrazzo of the villa. He was an elegant man with a finely trimmed black beard, rather cool in his welcome, and so Galileo was likewise. They got through the diplomatic necessities as quickly as possible, after which Guicciardini turned him over to his master of the house, Annibale Primi. Primi proved to be a cheerful man, a tall sanguine figure whose head was set a little before his body. He led Galileo and his contingent to the “two good rooms” Cosimo had ordered him to be provided with. And when Galileo had seen them, and arranged with Cartophilus their disposition, Primi led him through the gardens and up to the high point of the fifty-foot-tall man-made mound.
“This mound is dirt piled onto the nymphaeum of the ancient Acilian gardens. It’s just the extra height you need to get a view over the other hills, see? People often say it’s the best vista in the city.”
The other six hills at their various distances blocked a complete bird’s-eye view of Rome, but the prospect still gave them an almost overwhelming sense of the city’s tumbling vastness—a entire province of rooftops, it seemed to Galileo, like a million inclined planes set up for some supremely complicated experiment, with the Tiber a tin gleam here and there in the smoky expanse. All the other big hills were likewise occupied by great villas, and so appeared as mostly green islands sticking up out of tile-clad waves, the vineyards and cypresses on them creating lines horizontal and vertical.
“This is great,” Galileo said, wandering inside the high point’s circular wall as if on a Venetian altana. “What a city this is. We’ll have to bring up a telescope.”
“I would like that.” Primi pulled a big bottle of wine from his shoulder bag and held it up for Galileo’s inspection, a grin on his face.
“Aha,” Galileo said, bowing slightly. “A man after my own heart.”
“I assumed as much,” Primi said, “given what people say about you. And here we are, after all—on top of the world. You might as well celebrate when you get to a place like this.”
“So true.”
The two men sat on the low wall ringing the summit of the mound, and Primi uncorked the fiasco of wine. He poured tin cups full, and they toasted the day and sat and talked while they drank. Primi was the son of an innkeeper and reminded Galileo of his artisans—a quick man who had seen a lot and knew how to do a lot of things. He told Galileo about the greenhouses and the new galleries, and then they sat and looked at the city and drank. There was a noise to the city as well as smoke, a general grumbling hum. Galileo could see across the roofs to the Janiculum, where just four years before he had triumphantly talked to the pope and displayed his telescope to all the Roman nobility. So much had changed. “It’s a hell of a town,” he said, gesturing at it helplessly. He could not keep his fear entirely at bay, but the wine did loosen the strain of it in a comforting way. He breathed in that bracing effect, straightened up. Here he was, after all. At least now he could fight!