Marco Gobbi

What could have been the first distance measured by a man? Perhaps the distance between the shore of a river or a source of water from his camp or from a cave turned into a shelter? And which kind of reference points he would have used for moving and to reach it, the tallest tree in the middle of a forest or the particular conformation of a mountain? Walking on the ground, imagine that those could have been capable to be his guide signals, but if he had lifted the gaze above the thread of the horizon, even in a dark night broken just by the crackle of a fire..well other and more sublime maps would have been revealed to his eyes. A map of bright dots all of different intensities. 

The man, since ancient times, has always observed the celestial vault, creating relationships among what happened to him to a particular vision of an astral phenomenon.

I still remember the first visit to the Astronomic observatory, a scholastic trip at night. They asked us to bring a torch, one per child. An artificial illumination to illuminate a natural light, because that was the aim of it, pointers to reveal the sky. Tautology of the light.Perhaps some of that bright cones are still there to wander in the space and someone is measuring the distance they’re covering.

What the Specula was like, no one had ever seen: the first brother left only a booklet of sketches and notes, which for that matter had now disappeared.’ The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco.