★ This is a new work by Alessandro Bettini, the deputy director of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics of Italy and a renowned physicist.
★ Galileo was a master in multiple fields such as science, art, and music. This book collects his writings and paintings to present a comprehensive view of his colorful world.
★ As a famous dissenter, Galileo dared to challenge authority. The book delves deeply into the core of his thoughts and showcases his profound influence on later generations.

A visionary “Tuscan artist” for John Milton, the “greatest prose writer in Italian literature” for Italo Calvino, “a musician with a deft touch on the strings of the lute” for his friend Vincenzo Viviani, a “radical innovator in art criticism” for the great Erwin Panofsky. For almost everyone he was the genius who created modern science.

When we speak about Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the word “genius” is often mentioned. He not only laid the basis for science as we know it today, taught his contemporaries to read the “mathematical characteristics” of nature, understood the law of gravity, demonstrated that the Earth and the planets orbit around the Sun, and discovered the satellites of Jupiter with a telescope he made himself. He also painted, wrote, thought, played and invented things that would have been unthinkable before him. Galileo Galilei was the quintessence of Renaissance and hardly any field of human knowledge was foreign to him.
He was also a notorious dissenter, describing himself as having a “curious brain keen to counter opinions and doctrines commonly accepted even by professors of the arts themselves”, meaning that he was always ready and willing to publicly contradict the most respected masters of the day, often causing scandal as a result.
Here Alessandro Bettini collects Galileo’s writings and drawings, divides them by subject and shows with great clarity the genius’s rainbow of colours in an original biography which permits us to discover all the many-sided greatness of one of the most important thinkers of all time.

Alessandro Bettini is emeritus professor of Physics at the University of Padua and an experimental researcher in Elementary Particle Physics. Vice-president of the Italian Physics Society, for six years he was director of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory and previously vice-president of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. He has published more than 200 scientific articles in major international journals and is the author of university textbooks. For Bollati Boringhieri he has published Da Talete a Newton. La fisica nelle parole dei giganti (From Thales of Miletus to Newton. Physics in the words of the giants, 2019) and Nove parole della fisica. Vuoto, inerzia, atomo, simmetria, spazio-tempo, massa, eclissi, quark, cosmo (Nine Words from Physics. Void, inertia, atom, symmetry, space-time, mass, eclipse, quark, cosmos, 2021).