From the Lincei to the Vatican Gardens

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences traces a lineage back to the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome in 1603 as one of Europe's earliest scientific societies and, notably, an early academic home for Galileo Galilei. That original academy did not survive intact, and Pius IX refounded it as the Pontifical Academy of the New Lincei in 1847. The institution took its present name and statutes from Pius XI in 1936, who also gave it its current home in the Casina Pio IV, a sixteenth century villa in the Vatican Gardens built for Pius IV.

The academy's purpose has stayed consistent across its several refoundings even as its name and structure changed: to gather scientists of standing to advise the Holy See and to honor achievement in the sciences, functioning as a working scientific body rather than a purely ceremonial one. Its four century line of descent, however interrupted, gives it a claim to genuine continuity with the earliest organized scientific societies in Europe, predating the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences by decades.

The move into the Vatican Gardens under Pius XI also situated the academy physically within the same walls as the Holy See's central administration, a location its predecessor bodies in Rome had not shared.