Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa (then part of the Duchy of Florence), Italy, on 15 February 1564, the first of six children of Vincenzo Galilei, a famous lutenist, composer, and music theorist, and Giulia (née Ammannati), who had married in 1562. Galileo became an accomplished lutenist himself and would have learned early from his father a scepticism for established authority, the value of well-measured or quantified experimentation, an appreciation for a periodic or musical measure of time or rhythm, as well as the results expected from a combination of mathematics and experiment. Three of Galileo's five siblings survived infancy. The youngest,
Galileo Galilei for two years. He was educated from 1575 to 1578 in the Vallombrosa Abbey, about 30 km southeast of Florence. The surname Galilei derives from the given name of an ancestor, Galileo Bonaiuti, a physician, university teacher and politician who lived in Florence from 1370 to 1450; his descendants had changed their family name from Bonaiuti (or Buonaiuti) to Galilei in his honor in the late 14th century. Galileo Bonaiuti was buried in the same church, the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, where about 200 years later his more famous descendant Galileo Galilei was also buried. It was common