The Galilei Family Library 1649–1822

Abstract

This chapter offers a profile of Galileo’s grandson, Cosimo Galilei, and his role in dispersing annotated materials from the family library, many of which likely were given to Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo. An examination of the list of household items in 1669, made upon the death of Cosimo’s mother Sestilia, provides new details about books’ conditions, sizes, and formats. The chapter closes with an updated untangling of the fate of the books owned and presumed to have been inherited by Galileo’s self-proclaimed last student, Vincenzo Viviani, as seen through the lens of the rise of public libraries in Florence in the early eighteenth century.