In this lecture, I will briefly furnish as I go along relevant personal life events of my intellectual involvement with the DMA, to satisfy a legitimate curiosity about this obscure scholar who published only one article in Physis back in 1972, disappeared for more than twenty years, and suddenly comes back. My main intent is to summarize the story of the astounding diversity of the ways we scholars from Viviani (1674) down to Giusti (1998) reacted to this Pisan autograph On Local Motion which Galileo never discarded. I will take advantage of the oportunity which this Symposium offers to emphasize the need in our community for less "psittacism", that is, more rereading of the original textual sources instead of "parroting" secondary ones however authoritative, and more replicating of the experiments these texts contain, if we want our claim to understand and explain the production of past scientific ideas to be taken seriously.