On the afternoon of our package tour of Firenze, we were given some free time to explore. We wandered down to the Galileo Museum (Museo Galileo), which is alongside the Arno River.

It is a most interesting place but I really would have just liked to have had a whole day to wander through it. As it turned out I came out with less than half a dozen photographs.

One of them was of this armillary sphere, which is a model of the sky centred (in this case) on the Earth. This one was built between 1588 and 1593 by Antonio Santucci. It's the largest remaining one in existence, though it's not quite in original condition. The structure is wooden but the parts are covered by gold leaf.

It was an awful lot of effort for something that was so comprehensively wrong. Thanks Aristotle and Ptolemy, for holding back science by about 1500 years.

Still, it's a pretty attractive piece of craftsmanship.

If I had my time over again, the wide angle would have been with me.