by Suor Maria Celeste

Introduction

The young woman who wrote these letters led a cloistered life in a gilded age. Virginia Galilei, or Suor Maria Celeste as she signs herself here, entered a convent near Florence at the age of thirteen and spent the rest of her days within its walls. Although she devoted most of her time to prayer, she served as the convent’s apothecary, tended the sick nuns in the infirmary, supervised the choir, taught the novices to sing Gregorian chant, composed letters of official business for the mother abbess, wrote plays, and also performed in them. She saw as well to many personal needs of her famous father Galileo Galilei, from mending his shirts to preparing the pastries and candies he loved to eat. When he stood trial in Rome for the crime of heresy, she managed his household affairs during the year of his absence, sending him lengthy, detailed reports at least once a week.

Had she not been Galileo's daughter, her correspondence surely would have disappeared in the lapse of centuries. But because he saved her letters, brushing them with his importance, they endure to repeat their evocative story, still speaking in the present tense, suspended in the urgency of their once current affairs.

The 124 letters span a decade, from 1623 to 1633. In that period, a pope came to power who battled the Protestant Reformation and filled Rome with artistic monuments. The Thirty Years’ War embroiled all of Europe and Scandinavia. The bubonic plague erupted from Germany into Italy, where it ravaged the city of Florence until stemmed by a miracle. And a new philosophy of science threatened to overturn the order of the universe.

Suor Maria Celeste’s evocative letters touch on all of these situations, but they dwell in the small details of everyday life. They tell who is sick, who has died and who is getting well. They solicit herbs and fruits, fabric and thread. They beg for alms. They offer services, love and advice. They pray to the Lord for various blessings.

Except for the time Suor Maria Celeste chides Galileo for forgetting to send the telescope he promised she does not discuss astronomy or physics. Her letters show she follows his studies by reading his books and asking him to describe what he is working on now. More important, the letters expose a relationship that redefines Galileo’s character. Through them, the legend of a brilliant innovator becomes someone's loving father; the man generally thought to have defied the Catholic Church is seen to depend on the prayers of a pious daughter.

Suor Maria Celeste probably wrote Galileo many more than just these 124 letters, as she was already twenty-two years old by the date of the first in the series. Nor is there anything in that first letter of May 10, 1623, to suggest that it initiates their epistolary relationship. Another obvious gap occurs in the year 1624, which is represented by a single letter, dated April 26, just after Galileo set off at the height of his power to visit the new pope.

“What great happiness was delivered here, Sire, along with the news of the safe progress of your journey as far as Acquasparta," this one begins, "and we hope to have even greater occasion for rejoicing when we hear tell of your arrival in Rome, where persons of grand stature most eagerly. await you." Galileo stayed in Rome through early June. No doubt the long separation occasioned a stream of news to pass back and forth in writing, of which no trace remains. But it is the nature of letters to go astray. At least an appreciable sample of Suor Maria Celeste’s correspondence survives. Galileo’s replies, on the other hand, have disappeared.

“I set aside and save all the letters that you write me daily, Sire,” Suor Maria Celeste wrote on August 13, 1623, “and whenever I find myself free, then with the greatest pleasure I reread them yet again, so that I abandon myself to thoughts of you.” His half of their dialogue thus vanished through no fault of hers. Someone else must have lost or destroyed Galileo’s letters.

In the autumn of 1613, Galileo took his daughters to live in the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, about a mile south of Florence. Determined to keep them together, he had enlisted powerful friends-cardinals-to help him defy the local law barring the admission of natural sisters into the same convent. At thirteen and twelve, Virginia and Livia were not ready to be nuns, but girls as young as nine typically boarded at convents, awaiting the day they either took the veil at the canonical age of' sixteen or were taken out to be married.

Virginia and Livia seemed predestined for the convent because they were both “born of fornication” (out of wedlock, though not in adultery). Galileo might have found appropriate husbands for them had he been a wealthy man, but he spread his court stipend of one thousand scudi per year very thin by taking care of his widowed mother, making dowry payments for his two sisters, supporting his younger brother who had a wife and too many children, and helping out needy friends and neighbors who fell on hard times.

Virginia adopted the name Suor Maria Celeste when she professed her nuns' vows on the feast day of Saint Francis of Assissi (October 4) in 1616. Livia became Suor Arcangela on October 28th the following year. The girls now belonged officially to the Poor Clares, the second order of Franciscans, founded by Saint Clare of Assisi in the thirteenth century.

Secluded from ordinary affairs, the Poor Clares deprived themselves of earthly comforts to pray constantly for the souls of the world. The Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri was thus destitute by design, but sometimes the virtue of poverty put the nuns’ lives at risk, forcing them to appeal for outside assistance. Most of Suor Maria Celeste’s letters include a request of some sort, and each such supplication is followed, a few days later, by her thanks for the items received. It appears that her father never said no to her.

At no point in these letters does Suor Maria Celeste suggest that her father's science is irreligious or that the accusations made against him are valid. Never does she hint that her position in the convent is endangered by his revolutionary ideas or his interrogation at the Holy Office of the Inquisition. On the contrary, the other nuns and their father confessor all support her and anxiously track the progress of Galileo’s trial: "I greet you lovingly on behalf of all these reverend mothers, to whom every hour seems like a thousand years on account of their great desire to see you again.”

Book: Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo
Translated and Annotated by Dava Sobel
Penguin books
ISBN: 0-670-04306-0