Paolo Galluzzi

Paolo Galluzzi was born in Florence, Italy, on 23 April 1942. Details of his parents and childhood have not been made public. After a classical secondary education he enrolled at the University of Florence, the city that would remain his home and the centre of his working life for more than six decades. Tuscany's president Eugenio Giani described Florence as his native city and said his bond with the region was always very strong and indissoluble.

Galluzzi studied philosophy at the University of Florence under Eugenio Garin, the leading historian of Renaissance thought, and graduated in 1968 with a degree in the history of philosophy. He told The New York Times in 2018 that he was one of the first students in Italy to specialise in the history of science, a discipline that was not yet formally recognised, and that his passion for Galileo dated from those years, when the astronomer was regarded as a hero of reason against Church control.

After graduating he directed the Biblioteca Leonardiana in Vinci, the research library devoted to Leonardo da Vinci. From 1970 to 1980 he was a staff researcher of the National Research Council (CNR) at the Lessico Intellettuale Europeo in Rome, where he compiled a digital lexicon of Galileo's works. He taught history of science at the University of Siena from 1979 to 1994 and was full professor of history of science at the University of Florence from 1994 to 2010.

In 1982 he became director of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, succeeding Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli. He rearranged the collections thematically between 1986 and 1989, founded the journal Nuncius in 1986 and edited it from 1991 to 2007, expanded the library and expanded the institution into additional floors of Palazzo Castellani. He led a two year renovation that reopened the museum on 11 June 2010 as the Museo Galileo, and remained director until 2021, when he became honorary president.

He curated major exhibitions including La Fabbrica del Pensiero (1989), the travelling shows on Leonardo and Renaissance engineers (1995 to 1996), The Mind of Leonardo at the Uffizi (28 March 2006 to 7 January 2007), Galileo: Images of the Universe (2009) and the Codex Leicester exhibition at the Uffizi (2018 to 2019). He chaired the Nobel Foundation's international scientific committee for the Nobel Museum, presided over the National Edition commissions for Leonardo's manuscripts and drawings and for Galileo's works, led the national committee for the 2019 Leonardo quincentenary, directed the Einaudi Storia della Scienza and the Biblioteca della Scienza Italiana series, and presided over the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica and the Fondazione Antonio Ruberti.

Galluzzi was married to Lynne, and the couple had two daughters, whose names have not been made public. According to a 2018 New York Times profile, his personal library held more than 20,000 volumes, he collected wine, mostly French, and he produced olive oil from the trees on his estate near Vinci. Despite championing digital tools, he wrote his academic texts by hand, calling himself a hyper-corrector who found that typing interfered with reflection.

Galluzzi believed the scientific heritage of figures such as Galileo and Leonardo should be available to everyone, and he saw digital technology as a way for a small museum to compete with giants like the Uffizi. He viewed Galileo as a symbol of freedom of thought, describing the scientist's relics as a mirror of religious relics and Galileo himself as a secular saint. He was openly critical of commercial Leonardo shows built on poor copies, saying they were made by people who did not even know when Leonardo lived.

Galluzzi transformed a one-floor museum with a single staff member into the Museo Galileo, an internationally recognised research institute and museum drawing about 300,000 visitors a year, with a website launched among the first in Italy and digital libraries such as Galileo//thek@ and Leonardo//thek@. The Italian Society for the History of Science credited him with combining philological rigour, interpretive originality, institutional vision and innovation, and with campaigning for legal recognition and protection of Italy's scientific heritage. His hundreds of publications reshaped the study of Renaissance science, Leonardo, Galileo and his school, European scientific academies and scientific museology.

Gold Medal and First Class Diploma for Merit in Culture, awarded by the President of the Italian Republic (2003). Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2005). Fiorino d'Oro, the highest honour of the City of Florence (2011). Lifetime Achievement Award of the Italian Society for the History of Science (2026). National member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, and corresponding member of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti.

Galluzzi was a frequent lecturer and interviewee. He spoke on Galileo's Il Saggiatore (2011) and Sidereus Nuncius (2017) at the Festivalfilosofia in Modena, gave a lecture on Leonardo at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, spoke in a HarvardX lecture series on Galileo, and gave the Laterza Lezioni di Storia lecture on Galileo in 2019. Major profiles of him appeared in The New York Times in 2010 and 2018.

Paolo Galluzzi died in Florence on 29 October 2026, aged 84, after an illness, as reported by ANSA. The specific cause was not made public. The Museo Galileo expressed deep sorrow and recalled him as a distinguished historian of science and a pivotal figure in its history, and Tuscany's regional president Eugenio Giani said Tuscany and science had lost one of their finest sons. Funeral and burial arrangements had not been made public at the time of publication.