The project

Welcome to a journey of discovery of one of the world's most important heritages of historical-scientific and natural heritage. You can admire up close collections of inestimable scientific and artistic value, browse through manuscripts of philosophers and scientists whose works are milestones in the history of Western science and culture, embark on a tour of Tuscany by retracing the places of Galileo's life and the celebration of his revolutionary discoveries.
The scientific legacies of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo and the interest of the Medici and Habsburg-Lorraine in the sciences have contributed to the formation of collections that hold masterpieces of science and embrace many areas of scientific knowledge: astronomy, botany, mineralogy, zoology, ethnology, paleontology, anatomy, malacology, cartography, chemistry, meteorology, engineering, and scientific instruments.
In order to enhance this part of Tuscany's heritage, in which levels of absolute excellence were reached and maintained for a long time, massive campaigns of digital acquisitions, cataloguing and study of multiple manuscript documentary collections (more than 165,000 papers) and thematically diverse scientific collections (about 6,000 artifacts) have been conducted, with the dual purpose of safeguarding them and also making them accessible to the international scientific community.
The portal also gives great prominence to some examples of the combination of art and science that distinguished Tuscan heritage for centuries: the materials related to botanical representations, the spectacular biological groups, the high artistic value of the wonderful anatomical waxes, musical instruments, scientific instruments, and cartography.
Deserving a separate mention are three instruments that are linked to Tuscany but have acquired international relevance, contributing to radical changes in various areas of knowledge: the telescope and other original instruments of Galileo, the birth of the piano with Bartolomeo Cristofori, and Barsanti and Matteucci's internal combustion engine.
Indeed, among the objectives of the portal is the desire to emphasize the international dimension of Tuscany's research and scientific heritage, both with regard to the provenance of the artifacts and to the resonance that the studies of Tuscan scientists and philosophers had throughout Europe and even beyond the borders of our continent.
At this stage, the Science portal is divided into two macro-sectors, which are interrelated: one focused on the figure, work and legacy of Galileo; the other dedicated to scientific collecting in modern-age Tuscany.

Galileo in Tuscany
Tuscany is rich in material and documentary evidence of the extraordinary fortune to the present day of the life and work of one of the greatest reformers of scientific knowledge of all time.
The completion of the digital acquisition of the entire collection of Galilean manuscripts held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence has been accompanied by the creation of a compelling tour of the region that touches on more than 40 sites. In fact, the portal offers an immersion in Galileo's Tuscany, which can possibly be divided into two routes: the places of Galileo's life, which were the scene of the most significant episodes of his research; and the places of Galileo's post-mortem celebration, which are interwoven with the theme of the formation and evolution of the Galileo myth from the mid-seventeenth century until the early decades of the twentieth century.

The Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History and the scientific collecting of the Medici and the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasties
This section of the portal welcomes collections and archival fonds related to the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History (founded in 1775) and, more generally, to the examination and representation of both the Tuscan territory and that which was the subject of scientific expeditions to distant countries. Falling within a predominantly regional dimension are Pier Antonio Micheli's seventy manuscript volumes (almost all of which are devoted to botany), Francesco Redi's studies described in the Redi-Cestoni fund of the Marucelliana Library, the Targioni Tozzetti mineralogical collection, and Giovanni Inghirami's first geometric map of Tuscany. These areas of research coexisted with the effort to create in Tuscany a material encyclopedia of science, collecting, cataloging, studying and exhibiting species found in most of the lands then known and instruments from the major European research centers-as is carefully documented in the archives of the Royal Museum. Exemplifying this tendency: the malacological collection of Niccolò Gualtieri, the Egyptian herbarium of Jacob Corinaldi, the herbarium holdings of the Botanical Garden of Pisa, the taxidermied specimens of Paolo Savi, and the acoustic instruments of the Tuscan Technical Institute.