Museo della Specola
Baroque observatory tower housing historic quadrants, telescopes and sky-reading instruments.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Museo della Specola in Bologna follows the astronomical tower above Palazzo Poggi, built through the 1710s and 1720s after Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili won Pope Clement the Eleventh's backing, and later staffed by astronomers from its first director Eustachio Manfredi onward. It turns to 1790, when mathematician Giovanni Battista Guglielmini climbed to the top with lead spheres to test Newton's prediction that a falling object should drift as the earth turns beneath it. Stand at the shaft and look straight down to where he marked each ball's landing spot, surrounded by the same quadrants, telescopes and globes the tower's astronomers once trusted.
This audio guide was created using AI.