alt Hacker NewsPeople who love this should consider visiting the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence (now rebranded the Galileo Museum for what I assume are marketing reasons :P).
It's heaven for science nerds.
Armillary spheres (including a room sized one from the 1500s), all manner of astrolabes, astronomical clocks, hand ground lenses and microscopes and telescopes and Galileo's actual middle finger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo's_middle_finger), a tabula affinitatum, michelangelo's compasses, even an organum mathematicum!!!!! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organum_Mathematicum)
Agreed, I went in September (we also just wandered into the separate natural history museum in Florence and enjoyed it). It's amazing how beautiful and handcrafted the instruments are. Much more aesthetic than the modern appliance-style instruments used for high-throughput biology (although many hand-built instruments with exposed parts are still cool-looking).