ABSTRACT
The Neapolitan polymath Margherita Sarrocchi was a seventeenth-century celebrity, linked to some of the most well-known figures of her time and praised in letters and verse by her contemporaries. At least sixteen women numbered among Galileo’s correspondents. Galileo’s epistolary relationship with his daughter, Virginia , a nun in the convent of San Matteo near Florence, was the most extensive, followed by that with Sarrocchi in Rome. Embedded in Galileo’s epistolary exchanges with Sarrocchi are the story of his efforts to promote and publicize the Starry Messenger while laying the groundwork for the publication and, he hoped, positive reception of his Letters of Sunspots. Born in Naples in 1560, Margherita Sarrocchi came to Rome after the death of her parents under the protection of the erudite cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto. Despite the shared literary and scientific interests described the correspondence between Sarrocchi and Galileo seems to have ended in 1612.
