Excerpt from The Private Life of Galileo By Galileo Galilei, Maria Celeste Galilei, Mary Allan-Olney

Galileo's Imprisonment at Arcetri

I stayed five months at Siena in the house of the Archbishop after which my prison was changed to confinement to my own house, that little villa a mile from Florence, with strict injunctions that I was not to entertain friends nor to allow the assembling of many at a time. Here I lived on very quietly frequently paying visits to the neighboring convent where I had two daughters who were nuns and whom I loved dearly but the eldest in particular who was a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me. She had suffered much from ill health during my absence but had not paid much attention to herself. At length dysentery came on and she died after six days illness leaving me in deep affliction.