Galileo’s priceless telescope returns to Italy

For five months, the telescope served as the centerpiece of the Franklin Institute's summer exhibition "Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy."

Today, its summer sojourn in America came to an end. The Philadelphia exhibition marked the first time the priceless telescope made by Galileo himself had ever traveled outside Italy.

Shortly before noon, Derek Pitts, the Institute's chief astronomer, and Andrew Chaikin, a visiting science writer, peered through the 400-year-old optical instrument one last time.

Then Giorgio Strano, the exhibit's Italian curator, donned a pair of cotton gloves. With an assistant, Strano gently lifted the mahogany-colored tube, swaddled it with white archival paper, and gingerly placed it into a foam-lined packing crate.

With another piece of foam placed over top the instrument, Stranos assistant sealed the lid to the box with a gently whining power drill and 12 screws.

The telescope, insured for about $3 million, will be flown under armed escort back to Florence, Strano said. It will go into temporary storage before its home, the Istituto e Museo della Storia di Scienza, reopens in the spring following renovations.

A Franklin Institute spokeswoman said attendance for the exhibit, which featured more than 100 items from the Medici collection, had exceeded all expectations. Official numbers, however, were not immediately available.

Pitts, who had described the arrival of the telescope in April as a "semireligious experience," said the Institute had been honored to host the spyglass, one of the legendary scientist's most treasured instruments.

"It was the only telescope found among Galileo's personal belongings when he died," Pitts said. "With it, he would have been able to see the phases of Venus, the craters of the moon, and Jupiter with its four largest and brightest moons."

Built by Galileo in 1609, the telescope is fashioned of two half-shells of carved wood, bound together with copper wire, wrapped in paper and varnished, Pitts said.

Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon, the Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts," said he had been "thrilled" to look through telescope briefly before it was packed away - even though he only saw some leaves out one of the Institute's third-floor windows.

"To think that Galileo saw the heavens through these same lenses," Chaiken said. "It represents the beginning of an era in which we could explore the universe not only with our minds but with instruments."

Strano said the telescope was one of 100 that Galileo made.

"But with the exception of a second owned by my museum, the others have all disappeared," Strano said. "They were not considered beautiful objects in the mid-17th Century. As more powerful telescopes were created, Galileo's were thrown away."