On the day of his arrival in the sprawling smoky city, Galileo stayed up late with his host Guiducci, and was brought up to date on the situation. As Galileo had seen in the tight crowded streets, the capital of the world was in a state of high excitement because of the new order of things. For the first time in decades, a pope with ambition was on the Throne of Peter, calling for new building projects, clearing whole quarters of the city, staging gigantic festivals for the populace, and encouraging literary societies and new organizations like the Linceans. No one remembered a time quite like it; it was not just the Lynxes who had felt the miraculous. To have the Borgias out of power (and the Medicis), all replaced by a vigorous, curious intellectual—it was springtime for everyone.
The next morning, therefore, Galileo’s hopes were high as he went to the Vatican to pay his respects. The familiar buildings and gardens had been recently washed. They looked bigger and more imposing, the gardens more luxuriant and beautiful. Giovanni Ciampoli, beaming happily, led him through the papal foyer and the outer salons to the inner garden, now bursting with flowers. There, taking a walk with his brother Cardinal Antonio Barberini, was the new pope, God’s envoy on Earth.
In the first second of the audience, Galileo saw that Maffeo Barberini was a changed man. It was not just the white robes, the surplice, the red vestment over his shoulders framing his elegant goateed head, the ermine-lined red cap, nor the deferent retainers on all sides, and the Vatican itself, although all these things were of course new. It was the look in his eye. Gone was the gleam of mischief Galileo remembered so well, and the look of open admiration for Galileo’s achievements, and the desire to be admired in return. Urban VIII was not present in the same way. His skin was smooth and pink, his domed forehead and long nose shiny. His eyes, round rather than oval, were now like watchful dark pebbles, alert even though his gaze angled away from Galileo’s as if looking at something else. He expected obedience, even obeisance, and already he was used to getting it. He was not even suspicious that he might not get it.
And of course Galileo gave it in full, kneeling and bowing to kiss the sandaled feet, which were perfectly clean and white.
“Rise, my Galileo. Speak to us standing upright.”
As he did so Galileo bit his tongue, checking the congratulations he had prepared. There was no question now of suggesting there had been anything won, or that the matter could have turned out any other way; one had to act as if things had always been like this. Referring to the past would have been a faux pas, even an impertinence. Silently Galileo kissed the big ring on the pontiff’s offered hand. Urban nodded coolly. He let Ciampoli speak for him, only nodding to indicate his approval of what was said, and occasionally murmuring things Galileo could barely hear. One curious glance was sharp, then he returned to the contemplation of some inner landscape. Even for Galileo, his favored scientist, he could not be bothered to be entirely present. It was as if the carapace of power he now wore was so heavy that he needed to attend to it always, and so thick that he did not believe anyone could penetrate it. Now he lived alone, at all times and in all places. Even his brother Antonio watched him as if observing a new acquaintance.
Ciampoli—always one of Galileo’s most peculiar and unhelpful advocates, a man boundless in enthusiasm but shaky in everything else—now spoke eagerly of Galileo’s accomplishments, in ways that pitched them too high, that caused Urban’s gaze at the flowers to sharpen again for a second as he tilted his head to listen. Barberini knew Galileo’s story already, and clearly this was not the moment to rehearse it. Why Ciampoli had been named Urban’s secretary was beyond Galileo to tell.
Soon Urban lifted a hand, and Ciampoli saw, well after Galileo, that the interview was over. Nervously, Ciampoli thanked Galileo for coming, speaking for Urban just as he had a moment before been speaking for Galileo. He was enunciating both halves of the conversation! Then he led Galileo away. No more than five minutes had passed.
Out in the vast antechamber Ciampoli repeated what he had written already in his letters, that he had been reading Il Saggiatore aloud to the pope during meals, and that Urban had laughed and called for more. “I am sure you are now free to write anything you want, about astronomy or anything else.”
But Ciampoli was a fool. He had speculated aloud that he was Virgil reincarnated, or perhaps Ovid. He wrote verses making fun of Urban behind Urban’s back, then distributed these verses to friends like Cesi and Galileo and others, as if the poems would not then eventually circulate and land in the hands of his enemies—and more important, in the hands of Galileo’s enemies.
So now Galileo merely nodded at him and murmured sounds of agreement, deeply irritated and uneasy. That his audience with Urban had gone less well than the ones he had had with Paul! It was startling, disturbing—hard to believe.
Thinking it over intensively in the days that followed, it finally occurred to him that old friends and favored ones were precisely the people that a new pope had to put in their place, which was at the same distance as everyone else: below. A very great distance below.
Clearly he would need another meeting with Urban, without Ciampoli on hand to get in the way. But how to get that was not obvious. Possibly no one ever met privately with this pope.
The next morning he visited Cardinal Francesco Barberini. They met in the little courtyard just inside the wall of the Villa Barberini, overlooking the brown Tiber.
It could be honestly said at this point that Galileo had helped Francesco more than Francesco had helped him. Francesco seemed perfectly willing to acknowledge this; he was gracious, he was grateful, he was without the slightest tinge of that resentment that gratitude so often contains. It was a truly enjoyable meeting rather than the pretense of one, full of laughter and shared memories. Francesco was taller than Urban and more handsome, sanguine and affable, with a big head like a Roman statue’s. His cardinal’s robes and regalia had been made in Paris, where he had lived for several years. That he had been one of the least effective diplomats in Vatican history was not so widely known.
He sounded encouraging when Galileo gingerly brought up the subject of Copernicanism. “My uncle once told me,” he said, “that if it had been up to him in 1616, you would not have been forbidden to write on this subject. That was Paul’s issue, or Bellarmino’s.”
Galileo nodded thoughtfully. “That seems right,” he said as he unpacked a microscope he had brought with him to show people—a kind of telescope of the small, which gave observers new and astounding views of the unsuspected detail and articulation of all the smallest things, including flies and moths, and now, because a trio of bees formed the Barberini family emblem, bees.
Francesco looked into the eyepiece and grinned. “The sting is like a little sword! And those eyes!” He held Galileo by the shoulder. “You always have something new. His Holiness my uncle likes that. You should show it to him.”
“I will if I can. Maybe you can help me?”
But before he next met with the pope, Galileo gave the device to Cardinal Frederick Eutel von Zollern, in the hope of gaining more support from Catholics north of the Alps. The first meeting with Urban had thrown him off his stride. He complained of the endless procession of meetings and banquets, and wrote back to Florence that being a courtier was a young man’s business.
Indeed, in his monomaniacal focus on his own affairs, he did not even seem to notice the matter that was consuming everyone else in Rome at this time, which was the war between Catholic France and Catholic Spain. This conflict was beginning to engulf all of Europe, with no end in sight. The Barberini were closely associated with the French court, as Francesco’s history made clear; but France recently had developed Protestant allies. Their foes, the Spanish Hapsburgs, still controlled both Naples and several duchies in northern Italy, squeezing Rome between them. They had immediate power in Rome as well, being the Church’s principal financial support. So despite his French sympathies, Urban could not openly oppose the Spaniards. In theory he could as pope tell all the Catholic crowns what to do, but in practice that hadn’t been true for centuries, if it ever had been, and now the two Catholic countries ignored him as they fought—or worse, threatened him for not supporting their side. Despite his wealth and the authority of St. Peter, in his foreign relations Urban was finding he had to walk a line even finer than the one on which Paul had balanced: a kind of thread across the abyss, with war waiting below if he fell off.