On our last day in Florence, Italy, we visted the Museo Galileo, a museum of the history of science. So many amazing ancient scientific instruments, both serious and playful!
One that lands on the playful scale is an optical toy from 1642, designed and built by Jean-François Nicéron, a French mathematician and friar. (The intersection of Faith and Science showed up again and again during our time in Florence.) Looking through the instrument at an apparently jumbled and nonsensical painting reveals an image of a portrait of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de' Medici.
On the more serious side, I was delighted to find a 17th century calculator (for addition) with dials turned by a hand-held stylus. It looked and functioned remarkably like the addition machine I remember my parents using when calculating their income tax in the 1950's (most likely a Sterling Dial-a-Matic).
And there I also saw my first Faraday Net. Looking remarkably as if you would use it to catch butterflies, it's actually the device Faraday used to demonstrate that an electric charge resides entirely on the outside of a charged conductor. It's a predecessor to the Faraday Cage, and explains why your cell phone stops working in elevators and why some people like to wear tin-foil caps.
The following gets a little technical, but if like me you have a particular interest in American Sign Language, you might enjoy it.
Sign Language in the Museum
There was one feature of the museum itself that puzzled me. Throughout, there were video screens displaying an image or video, along with text in both English and Italian, and a sign language interpreter (for what version of sign language I could not tell). At first I was just thrilled that they thought to include Deaf people—but then I thought, Why? Anyone old enough to be interested in the material would also be old enough to read the text.
The question intrigued me sufficiently that I posed it to Gemini, and received a detailed answer, which I've edited slightly for compactness. It simultaneously opened my eyes and left me with more questions.
[This] touches on a really fascinating aspect of how language, literacy, and accessibility work for the Deaf community.
To answer your first question: the version of sign language being used here is LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana), which is Italian Sign Language.
As for why the museum includes an LIS interpreter when written text is already available on the screen, there are a few very important reasons that usually surprise hearing visitors:
For many profoundly Deaf people, a sign language like LIS is their native, first language, while the written language of their country (like Italian or English) is actually a second language. Because sign languages have completely distinct grammar, syntax, and structure that don't match spoken or written languages, reading a dense paragraph of text can feel like reading a foreign language. Having a sign language interpreter allows them to receive the information in their natural, native language.
I knew this, but had not thought of it in a museum context. What it brings to mind immediately is the German-speaking Swiss. Their native language is the many dialects of Swiss German. High German is their written language, generally acquired when they enter school, and thus a second language. As far as native vs. acquired language is concerned, how is this different?
[A] hearing person can look at [a moving 3D object] while simultaneously listening to an audio track. A Deaf person cannot look at the text and look at the changing details of the historical instrument at the exact same time without constantly fracturing their attention. A sign language video allows for a much more fluid, visual processing of information that matches the natural rhythm of how Deaf individuals absorb visual content.
That's also a point I hadn't considered, perhaps because as a hearing person I had a similar problem. I'm certain there was audio available somehow for these displays, but they were silent as far as I was concerned, and I, also, had to "look at the text and look at the changing details…at the exact same time." I don't know enough to guess how watching both the changing details and the interpreter simultaneously fractures the attention less.
Many European museums receive funding or accessibility mandates to follow Universal Design principles. This means creating an environment that doesn't just provide a workaround (like text), but actively treats different language communities equally. By providing LIS, the Museo Galileo ensures that Deaf visitors get the same depth of engagement, tone, and emphasis that a hearing person gets from an audio guide.
It is a subtle layer of cultural and linguistic accessibility that hearing people rarely have to think about, but it makes a world of difference for the Deaf community.
The question of whether or not there are enough native speakers of Italian Sign Language to justify privileging them over others who also miss that depth of engagement—Deaf speakers of American Sign Language, for example, or visitors who speak neither Italian nor English—is an issue I can't effectively address. But as a former resident of Rochester, New York, which has a sizeable Deaf community, and having a daughter who took a college minor in American Sign Language, I enjoyed diving deeper into the reasons for the existence of these displays.
