Ok: back to the get-go, shirt in sweat-mode. In the next dew days I’m going to try and define the Betwixt, and Tom’s modest contribution, in the context of Padua, Venice & Verona while I enter the serious tourist life for a while.

As I wait for Giotto, (tickets 48 hours in advance, etc…) here is the start of a different and “betwixt” view of Padua’s greatest son, and Time magazine’s Man of the (last) Millennium. A new book, by Michael White…

“Galileo’s story instantly became the stuff of myth, an exemplary tale that could be told in several ways: man versus authority, science versus religion, conscience versus church. In some accounts he is a hero, in others a coward, in yet others an apostate. In the 20th century, Brecht, in his subtle and complex play The Life of Galileo, and Arthur Koestler, in his controversial history of science The Sleepwalkers, gave contradictory interpretations of the same story. Michael White, a brilliantly lucid exponent of scientific history, takes an unequivocal line on the material, bluntly stated in his title: Galileo Antichrist.”

From the Guardian. More on this key moment of science, art, politics and religion later. It is so interesting how an act, a moment, can be read in so many ways.