He died of natural causes, probably a heart attack, on 8 January 1642, aged 77, near Florence Italy.
I have been to his tomb in the Basilica di Santa Croce there, and a very moving moment it was to be near this great man. The same goes for the tomb of Michelangelo just nearby.
Not quite all of Galileo is there though, since the middle finger from Galileo's right hand is currently on exhibition at the
Museo Galileo in Florence.
He was blind since 1638, a sad thing for such a great scientist, the father of modern physics. He was threatened with Inquisition and placed under house arrest by Pope Urban VIII in the last years of his life, for the heresy of asserting that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not until 1992 did Pope John Paul II acknowledge that the Church had been wrong.
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