Every morning, rain or shine, was punctuated by the awful sounds of the maestro waking up. He would groan no matter how he felt, then curse, then shout for breakfast, for wine, for help getting out of bed. “Come here!” he would bark, “I need to hit somebody.” After drinking several cups of tea or watered wine, he would get up and dress, go out and limp around his garden, inspecting the many varieties of citrons he had planted in big terra-cotta pots, on the way down to the jakes to relieve himself. On his way back up he would limp, moaning again, and often stop in the bean and wheat fields, fingering the stalks and leaves.

When he returned to the house they could tell whether he was feeling in good health that day or not. If he was, then all was well. The house would begin to buzz with the work of the day. If he wasn’t, he would crawl back into his bed and cry hoarsely for La Piera, the only one who could deal with him in these crises. “Pee!—air!—aaaaah!” Then everyone would fall silent, and a gloom would settle on the place as we prepared to wait out another period of illness. There were so many of them.

But if things were well with him, he would go to a big marble-topped table that he had had set up under the arches on the front side of the villa, in the shade and the cool, out of the rain but in the clean air, and the light that he required. He sat before it in a chair with cushioning contoured to support his hernia, which allowed him to take off his iron truss. His Padua notebooks and the fair copies made by Guiducci and Arrigheti lay stacked on the desk according to a system that the servants all had to respect unfailingly or else they would be kicked and struck and horribly cursed. As the morning progressed, he paged through these volumes thoughtfully, studying them as if they had been written by someone else; and then, leaving one or two of them open, he would take up blank sheets of parchment, his quill and inkpot, and begin to write. He would only write for an hour, two at the most—either chuckling or swearing under his breath, or heaving great sighs; or reading sentences aloud, amending them, trying different versions, writing drafts on blank loose sheets or the backs of notebook pages that had not been filled. Later he would transcribe what he liked onto new blank pages, and when they were full, file them with the other finished pages in a particular pigeonhole of a cabinet set on the desk. Sometimes when finishing for the day he would shuffle the pages to make the stack of them appear higher. Some days he wrote a page or two, other days twenty or thirty.

Then with a final loud groan he would stand, stretching like a cat, and call for wine. He drank the cups off in a couple of swallows, then strapped on his truss and took another walk in his fields. If it was late enough for good shade, he would sit on a stool and move down the rows of vegetables, pulling out weeds with the stab of a little trowel. He took great satisfaction in killing weeds, filling bushels with them for the compost heap down by the jakes. Sometimes he would hurry back up to the villa to write down something good that had occurred to him in the garden, orating the idea so as not to forget it. “Oh, the inexpressible baseness of abject minds!” he would shout as he limped up the hill. “To make themselves slaves willingly! To call themselves convinced by arguments that are so powerful that they can’t even tell what they mean. What is this but to make an oracle out of a log of wood, and run to it for answers! To fear it! To fear a book! A hunk of wood!”

Another time, limping hastily uphill: “For every effect in nature, some idiot says he has a complete understanding! This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the understanding of one single thing, thus truly tasting how knowledge is accomplished, would then recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing.” Shouting this at the top of his lungs, down at Florence, out at the world. Writing it down as he pronounced it again. Back and forth, from desk to garden to desk.

In the late afternoon, if it was nice, he would usually stay in the arcade until sundown, writing faster than ever, or reading in his notebooks as he drank more wine. He would watch the sunset, for those few moments seeming at ease. He would sketch the clouds if there were any. The blue of the sky was something he never tired of. “It’s just as beautiful as the colors of a rainbow,” he would insist. “Indeed, I say the sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”

On many afternoons a letter would arrive from Maria Celeste. These he always opened and read immediately, frowning with worry as he began, but often enough then smiling, even bursting into laughter. He loved these letters and the candied fruit that often accompanied them, tucked in a basket that he would then send back to her filled with food. He often sat down and wrote his reply to her on the spot, eating candies as he wrote, then calling for La Piera to prepare the basket for return that same day.

He liked to write, it appeared; and when he was writing, life at Bel-losguardo was good. There were hours when he would just sit there contentedly, staring at nothing, grattare il corpo as the saying goes, scratching his belly in the sun: very rare for Galileo. He withdrew from the world at large, and ignored even matters he should have attended to. He neglected his court duties, and paid no attention to the larger European situation, or indeed anything outside the villa beyond his scientific correspondence, which was always voluminous. The household was happy.

But ignoring the European situation was a mistake. And he should have been paying more attention to what people were learning about Pope Urban VIII as the months and years passed. For people in Rome were telling stories. It was said, for instance, that Galileo had again been denounced to the Inquisition. The denunciation was anonymous, but was said to have been made by one of his enemies among the Jesuits, perhaps even Grassi, whom he had made such fun of in Il Saggiatore. Because Grassi had hidden behind a pseudonym, Galileo had been free to stick his supposedly unknown opponent mercilessly. Sarsi’s subsequent rebuttals had been just as sharp; he had referred to Il Saggiatore as L’Assaggiatore, The Wine-Taster, which everyone laughed at, except Galileo.

But that was just a joke. A denunciation to the Holy Office of the Congregation was a very different thing. One rumor said that the denunciation had nothing to do with the banned Copernican world system, but rather with something about the atomistic views of the Greeks. Bruno had spoken for atomism; the war with the Protestant countries in northern Europe was supposedly being fought over atomism, because of what it implied about transubstantiation. So it was potentially more dangerous even than discussing the two world systems, and yet Galileo was unaware that it even constituted a problem.

Then there were other, more public signs of trouble. Urban was beginning to flex his papal powers, taking on with gusto the traditional task of rebuilding Rome. He decided to build an arch over the altar in St. Peter’s, under which only he could conduct services. And since beams long enough to span the altar were no longer available on the deforested slopes of the Apennines, his builders raided the Pantheon and took most of its beams away, almost wrecking the ancient building. “What the barbarians failed to do, the Barberini finished off,” people said of this vandalism. Slogans like this were only the surface of a growing undercurrent of dislike for the new pope. “On ascension, the bees turned to horseflies,” people were saying. The Avvisi began to print rhymed attacks on the pope, and alarming horoscopes that predicted his imminent death. Urban had a now rather old-fashioned obsession with astrology, and these scurrilous dark horoscopes disturbed him so much that he made it a capital crime to predict a pope’s death. After that no more were published, but the word was out, the feeling was abroad. Popes were appointed in old age for a reason; good or bad, they did not last long, and the frequent succession of doddering elders kept churning the pots of patronage. But Urban was hale in his fifties, and full of nervous choleric energy.