And Yet It Moves

The story

In June 1633 Galileo Galilei was in Rome before the Holy Office. He had published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632. On 22 June 1633 he abjured. The text he accepted says the idea that the earth moves is false. It does not contain the Italian sentence Eppur si muove, and no report from that day records him saying it.

The story turns up later. In The Italian Library (London, 1757), Giuseppe Baretti calls him the celebrated Galileo, “who was in the inquisition for six years, and put to the torture, for saying, that the earth moved.” Baretti then has him, the moment he was set at liberty, look up at the sky and down at the ground, stamp his foot, and say Eppur si muove, “that is, still it moves.” The index of that book points to the entry at page 52.

The Italian line, and the later English “And yet it moves,” are what people remember. Baretti’s frame around it is not history. Galileo was not released that moment to stamp his foot in the courtroom. He lived the rest of his life under restriction, at Arcetri, and he died there in 1642. The six years and the torture are part of the same paragraph as the famous words. They travel together, and the trial papers do not carry them.

Robert-Fleury’s Galileo before the Holy Office (1847) paints a hall of clerics and a standing old man, which is the scene the legend wants. It was made two centuries after the abjuration. Another defiance on this site, Leonidas answering a demand for his arms, is at least a saying preserved in an ancient collection. This one is a story first famous in a London book of 1757, attached to a man who had just signed the opposite.