Galileo Galilei. Lo splendore e le pene di un «divin uomo»

This richly illustrated book, published to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, reveals the appearances of main and 'second lead' characters in this drama, retraces the dense correspondence between friends and enemies, the debate in clergymen and scholars' circles, the gestation of fundamental works in the story of scientific and philosophical thought, the sorrows of Galileo, "divine man" condemned to pay with humiliation and solitude for the privilege of forever changing the ways of Knowledge and Man's concept of himself and the Universe. In this book, enthralling like a novel, but accurate like a treatise, Sergio Pagano tells us the true story of Galileo's drama, from the glory and acknowledgements for his inventions and discoveries, through early charges of heresy and the prohibition, by Cardinal Bellarmino, to assert and propagate Copernicus' theories, onto the trial, the abjuration and the death of Galileo, after years of confinement and dejection, to ascend thereafter into the Olympus of Science's Heroes and have his greatness finally acknowledged.