Planetarium of Rome
After more than twenty years of waiting, the capital’s new Planetarium is a reality, and at a particularly happy time for the spreading of Italian astronomy, as a number of new structures extend across all of the nation. Rome’s Planetarium was established in 1928, among the first in Europe, and closed at the beginning of the 1980s, when the historic Octagonal Hall of the Exedra of the Baths of Diocletian, was made over to other uses. The new planetarium reopened in a different building in May 2004, thanks to the interest of the Office of Cultural Politics of the Municipality, the Lazio Region and the University of La Sapienza.
The Planetarium was established within the buildings of the Museum of Roman Culture in EUR and provided with a new technologically advanced projector, which replaced the old Zeiss II model. In a series of adjacent rooms, an Astronomical Museum was developed with models, planetary dioramas and multimedia stations, which integrate the cultural and educational aspect of the planetarium. The Planetarium and the Astronomical Museum function as mutually complementary structures, furnishing the stimuli of interweaving questions and answers, at many different levels of understanding. The association with the Museum of Roman Culture, meanwhile, aims to illuminate the static (and amazing) archaeological displays with a new light, introducing scientific and technological stimuli, playing with the contrast between ancient and modern. This underlines how scientific and astronomical culture can, and should, be inserted into a historical context, and how a multidisciplinary perspective, which overcomes the dichotomy between the physical sciences and the humanities, should be privileged.
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