The Last "Word"...

So I was thinking of some of my favorite things I've seen in my life and this is at the top! A few years back I went to Italy and being a museum geek, I couldn't get enough. Rome was incredible and the Vatican City was so much more than I expected. I ventured on to Florence and well, off the beaten path I found this relic. Here's an excerpt from Rick Steve's book on Florence:

Galileo is, perhaps, best known as a martyr for science. He popularized the belief (conceived by the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, in the early 1500s) that the Earth orbits around the sun. At the time, the Catholic Church preached an Earth-centered universe, and, at the age of 70, Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition in Rome and forced to kneel and publicly proclaim that the Earth did not move around the sun. As he walked away, legend has it, he whispered to his followers, “But it does move!”
His students preserved this finger bone, displayed on a marble pedestal, as a kind of sacred relic in this shrine to science. Galileo’s beliefs eventually triumphed over the Inquisition, and, appropriately, we have his middle finger raised upward for all those blind to science.