De Motu Animalium

in Rome, having been co-opted into the beneficent patronage of QUEEN CHRISTINA, and received into our house of the Pious Schools of Saint Pantaleon near the Piazza Navona to instruct our Religious students in Mathematics (at which time he labored for them on the Conic elements of Apollonius and the works of Archimedes in 1679, and added others), he lived there happily for almost two years, mindful of the old association which he had enjoyed with our Order in Florence, especially with Father Francis of Saint Joseph, a Lecturer of Mathematics in the Pisan professorship, who, having returned to the world, was called Famianus Michelinus, and published a work on the direction of Rivers; and with Father Angelo of Saint Dominic, who was a student of the most famous man Galilei in that same place, and who, even now among the living, honors his grey hairs with Religious integrity, and with many others; and he conducted himself among us with such a rare example of modesty, sobriety, and equanimity that he seemed to breathe the spirit of Socrates, Plato, or some other from those ancient founders of sects, except that he added the ornament of the Catholic faith, in which he always showed himself most pure, so much so that, when the subject of systems arose in the teaching of Astronomy, he would say: "Whatever others may have said must be omitted; thus the Holy Church teaches, thus it must be believed, and this must be held as certain in obedience to her." His piety also shone forth in many things; for he attended Mass daily, frequently received the most holy Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, having employed Father Master Jacobo Riccio of the Dominican family, the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of the Index, as his confessor, whom he uniquely respected—along with his own brother, Michael Angelo, likewise the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Indulgences and Relics—as two luminaries of this age, not to mention the City, both in regards to the sciences and in regards to morals. Before he went to bed, he was often seen by our brothers with his knees bent before his bed, engaging in prayer and supplication. He never allowed a small image of the Blessed Virgin to be moved from his bed, testifying that he held the greatest veneration and faith in it; I have decided to suggest these few things of this kind so that it may be known with what a happy bond he joined the sciences with Catholic piety: moved by which arguments, I was often accustomed to say to his students that they had been allotted a teacher who could be no less an example of religious morals than a word of doctrine.

Finally, stricken with pleurisy and knowing that death was now imminent for him, having piously and humbly sought and been fortified with all the Sacraments,