| Abstrakt: |
The history of Torino’s ancient astronomical observatories is closely related to three scientists: the famous mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the Piarist father Giambatista Beccaria and the Piedmontese baron Giovanni Plana. In this paper will also be mentioned the architects who designed the observatories in Turin and other great figures of the history of science, including Ruggero Boscovich, Benjamin Franklin, Leonhard Euler and Charles Babbage, who were in contact with those three central personalities of Piedmont in the 18thand 19thcenturies. In its first hundred years, to satisfy the needs of astronomers, the observatory was built and then moved to different places, all located in the centre of the city, until 1913 when it was permanently situated in Pino Torinese, a small town in the hills near Turin. This contribution, which focuses on the period from 1759 to 1864, briefly recounts the rise of astronomy as discipline in Piedmont, and its intrinsic relationship not only to the University of Turin and the Academy of Sciences, but also to the city itself, which in that period was evolving from a political capital of the Sardinia Kingdom into an industrial capital of the newly-formed Italian nation. |
