Speaker
Description
I intend to focus my attention on Giuseppe Bianchi (Modena 1791-1866), an astronomer and mathematician whose versatile culture made him a protagonist of Modena's scientific culture from the Restoration of the Austro-Estense Dukes in the Estense State. To the Dukes he owed his training in Milan at the Brera Observatory from 1814 and the prestigious assignments they entrusted him with in Modena until 1859 in the Estense State. Returning to Modena in 1818, he was given the teaching of Theoretical Astronomy at the University, to which was linked the creation of the Modena Observatory, which he strongly supported. His conspicuous and little-researched epistolary preserved in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena may allow us to investigate interesting aspects of scientific studies in the first half of the 19th century. The aim of my presentation is to investigate, through the letters of his teachers at the Brera Observatory, their contribution to the development of Bianchi's studies and research and to the creation of the Modena Astronomical Observatory in the east tower of the Ducal Palace between 1826 and 1827. He was in direct contact with Giovanni Angelo Cesaris from 1816 to 1822 and longer with Barnaba Oriani, from 1817, by then at the end of his Milanese education, until 1830, two years before Oriani's death. His relations with Francesco Carlini were long-lasting: started as early as 1815, a year after Bianchi's arrival in Milan, they lasted, as can be seen from a hundred letters, until the year Carlini died in 1862.
