Celestial splendors. Observing the Sky from Galileo to Gravitational Waves

It represents one of the main initiatives organised to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of the publication of Galileo Galilei's Saggiatore, the book that, stemming from a dispute on the origin of comets between Galileo and the Jesuit Orazio Grassi, laid the foundations of the modern concept of science based on observation and experimentation. The 'celestial splendours', as we read in the Accademia dei Lincei’s dedication to Pope Urban VIII, are the comets and, by extension, the new worlds that the telescope made it possible to see for the first time in the history of mankind: the mountains of the Moon, the sunspots, the phases of Venus, Jupiter’s satellites and the infinite stars of the Milky Way. A new look of the universe destined to radically change the geocentric cosmological conception in favour of the Copernican hypothesis.

Exhibition Dates