Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (27):
Hello, Italia!
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (astro-photo-poem-essay) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)
In 1916
the strong Italian community inaugurated the Italian Church, a superb building on the main boulevard in Bucharest, which I visited several times in October 2020.
I then noticed an amazing astronomical fresco on its tower, including the clock hours around the Sun, a star-like object, a comet, the planet Saturn and a phase of the Moon, maybe a penance in memory of the martyr priest Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for the sake of astronomy in 1600.
In history, the Italian Church was the closest representative of the Catholic Church, confounding with it.
After well-known mistakes (see also the processes of Galileo Galilei, started in 1615) made in the same era with the extraordinary reform of the Gregorian Calendar (1582), the Catholic-Italian Church abandoned the geocentric system and spectacularly changed its attitude, opening up to free astronomy.
Thus, in 1774 the Vatican Observatory began to use a high-performance telescope and in 1790 another major Italian observatory was created in Palermo, where another priest, Giuseppe Piazzi, discovered the first asteroid, Ceres, in 1801.
Moreover, today, Italy is a force in world astronomy, on the one hand, and the Vatican Observatory organizes many international educational-astronomical activities, on the other hand.
In those days, I tried to greet the Italian Church in Bucharest, photographing it with Venus in the blue morning sky, the Afternoon Sun, and Mars in the black evening sky.
Would you like to say something,
Giordano?
#poetry