Galileo Galilei of her life. Vincenzo was later legitimised as the legal heir of Galileo and married Sestilia Bocchineri. Although Galileo seriously considered the priesthood as a young man, at his father's urging he instead enrolled in 1580 at the University of Pisa for a medical degree. In 1581, when he was studying medicine, he noticed a swinging chandelier, which air currents shifted about to swing in larger and smaller arcs. To him, it seemed, by comparison with his heartbeat, that the chandelier took the same amount of time to swing back and forth, no matter how far it was swinging. When
Galileo Galilei (opera) an old, blind man after the trial and Inquisition for his heresy, it explores his religiosity as well as his break with the church, and expands into the greater, oscillating relationship of science to both religion and art. It reaches its end with Galileo — as a young boy — watching an opera composed by his father, Vincenzo Galilei, who was a member of the Florentine Camerata, an association of artists who are credited with creating the art form that came to be known as opera. Ironically, his father's opera is about the motions of the celestial bodies. The opera