400 Years of the Telescope

Had a good night's sleep at Steve Shore's apartment, walked to the railway station in Pisa and caught the train for Florence, in perfect weather, looking out over the Tuscan landscape so often painted during the Renaissance and, for all I know, afterward. A bus took me up the hill to the Hotel Villa Betania, where Scott discussed the Vulcan mind-melt that led him and Anita to follow the wrong car on the London ring road yesterday--as things turned out, only coolth was lost, not time, since Scott and Anita arrived as they were always going to, at the Florence airport, and a nice fellow from the hotel was there to meet them and put them in a taxi. Scott generously let me take a shower in his room (I hadn't wanted to wake Steve before I left) after had we had an enjoyable talk, during which I pointed out the coincidence that the professor he had spent Friday afternoon filming, Rob Iliffe, was married to the former girlfriend of Aaron Soule, whom he knows reasonably well, since Steve's girlfriend relied heavily on the research of Aaron's father Michael Soule to obtain her Ph.D.--also last Friday!--in conservation biology, and all have spent time at the Rocky Mountain Biological Institute together. Before long Kris returned, then Anita, and eventually Krista, with a nice couple from Chico who joined up to see a bit of the filming and a lot more of Florence. And in the midst of this, Michel Mayor and his wife came in from Geneva, delayed about 18 hours by the Alitalia strike action in Milan. An excellent conversation sprang up, continued in the pizzeria to which we adjourned as dusk approached, located just uphill from the "Porta Romana" that marks the southern extent of the old city walls. (The Florentines say "Africa begins at the Porta Romana," expressing their low view of people to the south of them, just as the Milanese explain that Africa begins south of the Po, and the Romans say that Africa begins south of Lazio (I think that the Neapolitans also say that Africa begins at Eboli, where the countryside turns a lot harsher.) I had to leave early to catch a train, which led to a long journey--I missed the train, but there was another in less than half an hour; however, that train sat for nearly half an hour extra in the station, and then, instead of going to Pisa as billed, came to a final halt only halfway, in Empoli, where another 40-minute wait produced the slow train to Pisa, making all the stops (more than one might expect in 35 kilometers). Another brisk walk brought me home, and so, with more huffing and puffing under my belt than usual, I am ready for sleep. Tomorrow is the Galileo casting call--will there be no one to re-enact for us?
Two of them? Twenty? A hundred?