Personal tools
Log in

Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

INAF

Istituto italiano di astrofisica - national institute for astrophisics

Ciao
You are here: Home INAF News 500 years of “Orlando Furioso” in Teramo

500 years of “Orlando Furioso” in Teramo

To celebrate 500 years of the first edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s chivalricpoem “Orlando Furioso”, in which the author imagines a space flight before its time, on 22 July 2016,the Astronomical Observatory of Teramo will host the play “Su l’ali del destrier verso la Luna”.

The play, staged by the company Il teatro della Memoria, is part of the Serata Ariosto which is organized in the context of the summer 2016 events sponsored by INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Teramo. The event will feature choreographed songs, live performances with copies of period instruments and commedia dell’arte scenes, narrating a fantastic journey through the four elements of Aristotle’s cosmology to the Moon following Astolfo in search of Orlando’s lost wits.

The Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Teramo Roberto Buonanno explained the reasons for this important initiative: “By opening our doors to the public, we are trying to illustrate the path that science makesto achieve its goals. In this framework, we decided to present characters that, while representing the “defeated”, are as important as successful scientists in defining the history of science. This year we have organized a show on Ludovico Ariosto, a contemporary of Copernicus».

“Orlando Furioso”, in fact, places itself in the moment of transition from the ancients’ cosmology toCopernicus’s modern cosmology. Ariosto takes up Aristotle’s cosmology but he describes a Moon with mountains and lakes, anticipating Galileos’s description of the Moon. Even the symmetric point of view which allows Astolfo to see the Earth become smaller and smaller as he approaches the Moon is one of the first intuitions of space flight and takes away from Earth the central role that Aristotele had given to it.

Source: ResearchItaly

Filed under: ,

THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE CAPTURES A STAGGERING QUASAR-GALAXY MERGER IN THE REMOTE UNIVERSE

Jul 05, 2024

An international research group led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics utilised the James Webb Space Telescope to witness the dramatic interaction between a quasar inside the PJ308–21 system and two massive satellite galaxies in the distant universe

FATE: forecasting optical turbulence to push the Very Large Telescope to its full potential

May 29, 2024

FATE: forecasting optical turbulence to push the Very Large Telescope to its full potential The FATE project began in November 2022 and entered the commissioning phase in September - December 2023. Once completed, it will enter in the operational phase in which ESO will be able to optimise observing strategies for the VLT and start planning those for ELT

MeerKAT+: the MeerKAT Extension

Feb 21, 2024

MeerKAT+: the MeerKAT Extension The handover of the first dish of the MeerKAT extension signals an important milestone for the SKA-MID construction