Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo Matematico Supremo (…) Dove ne i congressi di quattro giornate si discorre sopra i due massimi Sistemi del Mondo Tolemaico, e Copernicano (…)

"EPPUR SI MUOVE": A LOVELY COPY OF GALILEO'S CELEBRATED "DIALOGO" IN THE SECOND EDITION.

GALILEI, Galileo. Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo Matematico Supremo (…) Dove ne i congressi di quattro giornate si discorre sopra i due massimi Sistemi del Mondo Tolemaico, e Copernicano (…)

Florence [i.e. Naples], Tartini e Franchi, 1710.

4to, 2 parts in 1 volume; ff. [6], pp. 458, ff. [15]; ff. [1], pp. 84; with numerous illustrations in the text. Both parts with individual t-p, being the first title printed in red and black. the second part opens with a letter to the Gran Duchess of Tuscany. Contemporary full stiff vellum, ms. title to spine. Sporadic marginal spotting, short tear along rear hinge at the head of the spine. All edges sprinkled in blue. Original endpapers. An excellent copy.

Second Italian edition of "Dialogo sopra i due massimi Sistemi del Mondo", which first appeared in 1632 in Florence.

The work "was designed both as an appeal to the great public and as an escape from silence... it is a masterly polemic for the new science. It displays all the great discoveries in the heavens which the ancients had ignored; it inveighs against the sterility, willfulness, and ignorance of those who defend their systems; it revels in the simplicity of Copernican thought and, above all, it teaches that the movement of the earth makes sense in philosophy, that is, in physics... The Dialogo, more than any other work, made the heliocentric system a commonplace" (PMM).

This is Galilei's famous defense of Copernican heliocentrism, and the direct cause of his trial and imprisonment. In 1624, eight years after being forbidden to promulgate heliocentrism by the previous pope, Galileo was granted permission to write on the subject by the new Pope Urban VIII, his friend and patron for more than a decade—on the condition that Aristotelian and Copernican theories were put forward equally and impartially. To this end, Galileo wrote his work as a dialogue between Salviati, a Copernican, and Simplicio ("Dummy"), an upholder of the geocentric Ptolemaic and Aristotelian orthodoxy.

Carli-Favaro 413; Cinti 168; Riccardi, II, 512. PMM 128 (1st Ed.)