VISIONS OF NAPLES, FROM MAPS TO THE STARS

About Neapolitan and celestial maps belonging to the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte for the National Institute for Astrophysics. 

This art-historical journey could have no more fitting conclusion than the most precise celestial maps that can be made today and continue to be “handcrafted” and analysed by astrono-mers worldwide, including those from Naples. 

Gaia, the satellite that measured the position of a significant fraction of the stars of our galaxy, the Milky Way, did it with such precision that, in a hypothetical world where navigation would still use the stars as a reference, would be less than one millimeter, i.e. over a million times better than pre-telescopic observations.