I MOST SINCERELY THANK Silvio Bedini for bringing Suor Maria
Celeste into my life; Albert Van Helden for encouraging me to tell
her story; George Gibson for wanting to hear it; Michael Carlisle
for retrieving a treasure from Venice; Kristine Puopolo for her
curiosity; John Casey for his clues; Father Ernan McMullin for his
insights; Mariarosa Gamba Frybergh and Alfonso Triggiani for the
Italian lessons; I. Bernard Cohen for his blessing and dazzling;
Doron Weber and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the officers'
grant; William J. H. Andrewes for his support; Betty Sobel for her
research assistance; Owen Gingerich for his challenge and the
view from the Geniculum; Stephen Sobel for the lute music and
calendrics; Robert Pirie and the American Academy in Rome for
the night of the Lynx; Ken Soden and Frank Randazzo for the
itineraries; Irene Tully for the poem; Drs. Michael and Stephen
Sobel, Peter Michalos, Barry Gruber, Alan Katz, and Harry Fritts
for their diagnoses of diseases past; Flanzy Chodkowski for the
textbooks, hagiographies, and rosaries; Diane Ackerman and Lois
Morris for the notebooks; Antonia Ida Fontana and the National
Central Library of Florence for permission to view Suor Maria
Celeste's letters; Franco Pacini for the keys to Galileo's house;
Paolo Zaninoni for source materials from Italy; Mara Miniati for
carte blanche at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence;
Paolo Galluzzi for the secret of Galileo's tomb; Francesco Bertola
for arriving at Padua deus ex machina; Frank Drake for his celestial
mechanics; Chiara Peacock and Barbara Lynn-Davis for the Tus-
can gardens; Antonio Di Nunzio for entry into the Clarisse con-

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