Museo Galileo

From a room in the Uffizi to a grand-ducal museum, 1775

The instruments began as the Medici collection displayed in the Stanzino delle Matematiche, the mathematics room inside the Uffizi Gallery. Grand Duke Peter Leopold moved them out in 1775 into a purpose-made institution, the Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale, and the Lorraine dukes who followed kept adding to it through the electrical and chemical experiments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

That is why the two floors read as two different museums. The first floor is Medici, fifteenth to eighteenth century, and it is about the heavens: globes, armillary spheres, telescopes, the mathematics of navigation. The second is Lorraine, eighteenth to nineteenth, and it is about the laboratory bench.

Palazzo Castellani, an eleventh-century castle on the river

The building is the Castello d'Altafronte, an eleventh-century structure on the Arno bank that later became Palazzo Castellani. In 1929 the First Italian Exhibition of the History of Science made the case that scientific collections were part of Italy's cultural heritage, and in 1930 the University of Florence created the Institute of the History of Science with an attached museum, put it in this building and handed it the Medici and Lorraine instruments.

The institute kept that name — Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza — for eighty years. The shorter name on the door today is recent, and it is worth knowing if you are reading an older guidebook that sends you to a museum that seems not to exist.

Why it survives the Uffizi comparison

Our judgement, not a fact: this is the museum to come to on the day after the painting galleries, or on the Monday when they are shut. It is small enough to finish, the objects are singular rather than representative — there is no second copy of Galileo's telescope anywhere — and the labelling assumes you are interested rather than expert. If you have one museum left in you and Renaissance panels are the reason you came to Florence, go to the Uffizi instead; if you have already been, come here.

The Florence museums comparison sets both against everything else with prices and closed days.

Room VII: the two telescopes and the objective lens

The museum holds two telescopes made by Galileo and no others exist. One is leather-covered with gold decoration and magnifies about 21 times; the other is built of wooden shells with a paper covering and magnifies about 14. He began using instruments of this kind for celestial observation in the summer of 1609.

Beside them, framed on its own, is the objective lens he used in 1609 and 1610 for the observations that found the moons of Jupiter. Galileo gave it to Grand Duke Cosimo II; after his death in 1642 it stayed in Prince Leopold de' Medici's collection until 1675, entered the Uffizi, moved to the Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale in 1793 and spent the middle of the nineteenth century in the Tribuna di Galileo. The ebony frame around it was commissioned from Vittorio Crosten by the Medici in 1677, which tells you how quickly this piece of glass stopped being an instrument and became a relic.

Room VII: the finger

The middle finger of Galileo's right hand is in the same room. Anton Francesco Gori detached it from the body on 12 March 1737, when the remains were moved into the monumental tomb they now occupy in Santa Croce. It passed through several institutions and reached the Museo di Storia della Scienza in 1927.

People either find this the strangest object in Florence or walk past it. It is displayed matter-of-factly, in a small glass vessel, without ceremony.

Room VII: the compass, the thermoscope, the jovilabe, the inclined plane

The rest of the room is the working equipment. The geometric and military compass, which Galileo began making in 1597, is a calculating instrument for a wide range of geometrical and arithmetical operations and was the thing he actually sold. The thermoscope of the same year is an egg-sized glass with a long neck that shows air changing density with temperature. The jovilabe is a pair of rotating engraved disks tied to the Jupiter observations and the problem of finding longitude at sea.

The inclined plane, with its five small bells and a pendulum, is the one to stand in front of longest: it demonstrates the law of falling bodies by sound as well as by sight. There is also a compound microscope in the room, which the museum attributes to Giuseppe Campani rather than to Galileo — the label says so, and most guidebooks do not.

First floor, nine rooms: the Medici collection

Around Room VII sit eight more rooms of the Medici collection, fifteenth to eighteenth century. The object that stops people is Santucci's armillary sphere, a giant machine of brass rings built by Antonio Santucci to model the heavens, standing almost the height of its room. There are terrestrial and celestial globes in numbers you do not expect, and the thermometers made by the members of the Accademia del Cimento, the experimental academy the Medici funded from 1657.

Second floor, nine rooms: the Lorraine collection

The upper floor is eighteenth and nineteenth century, and it is the reason to bring anyone who is bored by telescopes. Grand Duke Peter Leopold's chemistry cabinet is here, along with the electrical and electromagnetic apparatus that records what Tuscany contributed to those fields, and the machines built in the workshop of the Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale specifically to demonstrate physical laws to an audience.

And then the obstetrical wax models from the Santa Maria Nuova hospital, which are anatomical teaching aids of extraordinary and unsettling craftsmanship. Consider that before you bring a child up the stairs; nothing is signposted as unsuitable, and nothing is hidden either.

The museum opens at 09:30 every day of the week. It closes at 18:00 on Monday and from Wednesday to Sunday, and at 13:00 on Tuesday. Ticket sales stop thirty minutes before closing on any day, so a Tuesday arrival at 12:35 is an arrival at a closed desk. The only annual closures are 1 January and 25 December.

Two Tuesdays in 2026 are exceptions and run to 18:00: 2 June and 8 December, both national holidays.

The Monday opening is the practical reason this page exists. Monday closes the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Bargello, the Pitti Palace and the Medici Chapels — every state museum in the city. It does not close this one, or Palazzo Vecchio, or Santa Croce, or the Duomo monuments. A Monday in Florence that includes this museum is a good Monday; the one-day plan has a Monday version built around exactly that.

• Quietest: the first hour on a Monday or Wednesday, before the Uffizi crowd finds its way east along the river
• Avoid: Tuesday after about 12:00, when sales have stopped or are about to
• Allow: about 1.5 hours for the Galileo rooms and one floor, 2.5 hours with the free app running

Lockers at the entrance are free, and there are two large padlocked storage boxes near the ground-floor ticket office for student backpacks and bulky bags — which matters if you have come from the Accademia, where large bags are refused outright and there is no cloakroom at all.

Accessibility is unusually good for a Florentine building of this age. The step-free ramp is at Lungarno Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici 2 rather than at the Piazza dei Giudici door, two elevators and two wheelchair lifts serve every floor with a limit of 325 kg, a standard manual wheelchair is lent free of charge, and there are accessible lavatories on all floors.

The Museo Galileo App is free and covers about eighty instruments of particular interest. It needs an internet connection, the museum's WiFi is free, and you need your own earbuds for the audio. There is no paid audio-guide rental price stated anywhere on the visitor pages.

• Free lockers at the entrance; two padlocked boxes by the ticket office for big bags
• Step-free entry at Lungarno Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici 2; lifts to 325 kg; free wheelchair loan
• Free app covering about 80 instruments — bring earbuds
• Cameras allowed without flash, tripods or selfie sticks, personal use only; professional shoots need written permission
• Bookshop on the ground floor, with catalogues, history-of-science titles and children's books

The man is in two places in this city and they are nine minutes apart. His remains are in Santa Croce, in the monumental tomb built when the body was moved in 1737 — the same move that separated the finger now in Room VII. Entry to the basilica is €10 with a €1 online booking fee, Monday to Saturday 9:30–17:30 and Sunday 14:00–17:30, and the basilica's own estimate for a visit is about 50 minutes. Santa Croce also holds Michelangelo and Machiavelli.

Do them in that order and you save money: the discounted €10 rate here is granted to Santa Croce ticket holders, so paying €10 plus €1 there turns €14 into €10 at this desk. The reverse does not work — nothing here reduces the Santa Croce price.

One clarification, because the search results confuse them: the private Leonardo da Vinci museums in Florence are separate institutions with separate tickets, and nothing on this page applies to them. We have not verified their prices or hours and do not print them.

The address is Piazza dei Giudici 1, on the Arno embankment immediately east of the Uffizi. From the Uffizi courtyard it is about two minutes; from Piazza della Signoria about three; from the Ponte Vecchio about four along the river; from Santa Croce about nine. Those are our estimates, measured between entrance coordinates and rounded up for the way Florentine streets run.

From Santa Maria Novella station it is roughly an eighteen-minute walk down through the centre. The urban bus and tram ticket is €2 and valid for 90 minutes on the fares in force since 1 August 2026, or €3 bought from the driver, and the same ticket covers tram T2 from the airport with no separate airport fare — the getting around page has the routes and the validation rules.

There is no parking and no reason to try. The museum sits inside the ZTL, which is camera-enforced Monday to Friday 07:30–20:00 and Saturday 07:30–16:00, with a night ZTL Thursday to Saturday 23:00–03:00 from April to October.

• Main entrance: Piazza dei Giudici 1
• Step-free entrance and ramp: Lungarno Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici 2
• Ticket desk on the ground floor; sales stop 30 minutes before closing
• Groups of 15 or more must book; individuals never need to

Two natural shapes. The first is the Monday: Palazzo Vecchio in the morning, this museum after lunch, Santa Croce before it closes at 17:30 — three good rooms on the day everything else is shut, which the Monday version of the one-day plan sets out with times. The second is the Santa Croce pairing on any day: the basilica first for the tomb and the €10 discount, then nine minutes west along the river to Room VII for the finger and the lens, which is a strange and satisfying way to spend an afternoon.

At any other hour it is the two-minute detour from the Uffizi that most visitors never make. If you are building a longer trip, the two-day plan and the three-day plan both leave room for it, and every museum in the city compared shows what else opens when this one is on its Tuesday half-day.

Every other museum, church and viewpoint in the city has its own page here, and the routes between them are set out in the day plans linked above.