Galileo’s Daughter

Dramaturgy Booklet

by Abhi Shrestha & Cori Lang

Portrait of Maria Celeste

The Convent of San Matteo, home of Maria Celeste

The Sisters of San Matteo belonged to the order of Poor Clares, also known as Poor Ladies, Sisters of Saint Clare or Clarisses. Clare of Assisi (1194-1253) founded the order in the thirteenth century under the tutelage of her friend and teacher St. Francis of Assisi.

The Poor Clares lived by these four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure.The Poor Clares at San Matteo lived in a state of poverty, and because of this the sisters at San Matteo supported themselves with money from relatives (like that which Maria Celeste frequently requested from Galileo). They also spent a great deal of time baking and sewing to raise funds for their subsistence.

In the 1600s, convents were an acceptable substitute for marriage for daughters of the upper classes. The convent of San Matteo, in Arcetri, was popular with the middle classes, because the entrance fee was lower than that of a convent inside the walls of Florence. Because Maria Celeste was an illegitimate child of Galileo, she was placed in a convent partly because Galileo could not afford the sizable dowry necessary to gain an acceptable husband, as well as the danger associated with Galileo’s increasingly risky publications on the universe.

Artifacts of Galileo

The telescopes used by Galileo (on display at the Museo Galileo in Florence)

Galileo’s finger encased in glass. His fingers, as well as a few teeth and a vertebra, were removed from his corpse as relics of science

Galileo exhumed

When Galileo died in 1642, he was still thought of as a heretic by Pope Urban VIII and the Catholic Church, and so he was given an unceremonial burial, interred in a small room off the chapel in the church of Santa Croce. Despite the efforts of his friends and disciples, it was not until 1737 that Galileo’s body was able to be exhumed and given a proper ceremony, burial, with a mausoleum built  to commemorate his achievements in life. 

However, when the people uncovered Galileo’s grave, they found two bodies, two coffins without any nameplates on them. After investigation, it was found that the body in the first coffin belonged to Galileo. However, the lower coffin contained the body of a young woman…

From Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel:

“The congregation divided itself solemnly in half, each group walking Galileo’s body partway through the basilica, so that as many participants as possible could share the honor of being his pallbearers. Then they carried the woman to the mausoleum, too, and they laid her in the sepulchre beside her father. Once the shock of the discovery had dissipated into the silence of the great empty church, those attendants who remembered Viviani could unfurl the mystery for themselves. The disciple, driven to despair by his failure to pay the tribute he felt he owed his mentor, had given Galileo something dearer than bronze or marble to distinguish his grave. Even now, no inscription on Galileo’s much-visited tomb in Santa Croce announces the presence of Suor Maria Celeste. But still she is there.”

Writer’s Views of Contemporary Florence