Galilei's house is in Arcetri, a little town just a mile south of Florence. Sentenced to house arrest by the Inquisition in Rome for defending the revolutionary sun-centered Copernican universe against the traditional earth-centered Ptolemaic world-view, Galileo returned to his Arcetri house in 1633, and stayed there until he died in 1642.

Erich Lessing has two fine photos of it, one of Galileo's house, another of his study there. See the house HERE
And Galileo's workroom with his table and a globe HERE

The web page "Galileo's House in Arcetri" has 17 fine, well-labelled photos of Galileo's house and of other colorful buildings, villas and scenes in the neighborhood. Included are: the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, a world class institution just 100 meters from Galileo;'s house, operated by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics; and, about two blocks from his house, the Monastery of San Matteo. which in Galileo's time was the Convent of San Matteo, where his two daughters lived out their lives as nuns of the order "Poor Clares." Today a plaque on the wall commemorates their lives there, perhaps in response to the popularity of Dava Sobel's book, "Galileo's Daughter," which vividly describes their lives in the convent.

"Galileo's Daughter" is a wonderful book. While writing and researching it, Dava Sobel made four trips to Arcetri to Galileo's house and the nearby convent of San Matteo (Saint Matthew), where he sent his daughters Virginia, age 13, and Livia, 12. At 16, Virginia took her vows and the name Suor (Sister) Maria Celeste, reflecting her father's interest in the celestial spheres. A year later, Livia, now 13, became Suor Arcangela. In an interveiw with her paperback publisher, Penguin Books, Dava Sobel confessed that "The most moving moment for me was seeing the convent from the window of Galileo's study in his own house around the corner, and realizing how close to each other they had lived."

Galileo had tried to get both his daugters into one of Florence's 53 convents, but none would take them; it seems it was against the law to put two sisters into the same convent. Somehow Galileo got the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri to take them both, and that may be why he set up his own house and studio there: so he could be close to them?

You might well wonder, if Galileo loved his daughters enough to want to be near them, why did he stick them in a convent in the first place instead of marrying them off? He apparently felt they were unmarriageable. First, they were not "legitimate," for he had never married their mother, Marina Gamba, whom he had met during his days in Padua. Second, he couldn't afford to. Yet, after flattering his Medici patrons by naming the four moons of Jupiter "Medicean stars" after the four sons of the Grand Duke, Cosimo de' Medici and getting rewarded by becoming "philosopher and mathematician to the Grand Duke," Galileo was able to legitimize his son Vicenzio so he could inherit his property. Why then couldn't he also afford to legitimize and marry off his two daughters?

The reason lies in those 53 convents, which you can still see as part of nearly every church in Florence. They stand as mute testimony to the fact that in those days due to the huge dowries required hardly anyone in Italy could afford to marry off his daughters. Even rich men concentrated their wealth in the dowry of an oldest daugter and sent the other girls into convents. For those less well off, the alternative was the streets. In 16th-century Venice, for example, with 150,000 inhabitants, 10,000 were prostitutes.

The paperback publisher of "Galileo's Daughter," Penguin Books, provides a free reader's guide about it, including a nice interview with Dava Sobel, HERE