The exhibition, curated by Filippo Camerota, is organized by the Galileo Museum in collaboration with EGO-European Gravitational Observatory, with the support of the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze Foundation and Unicoop Firenze.

The exhibition constitutes one of the main initiatives carried out to celebrate the 400 years since the publication of Galileo Galilei's Assayer, the book which, born from a dispute on the origin of comets between Galileo and the Jesuit Orazio Grassi, laid the foundations of the modern concept of science based on observation and experimentation. The "celestial splendors", as we read in the dedication of the Accademia dei Lincei to Pope Urban VIII, are the comets and, by extension, the new worlds that the telescope allowed us to see for the first time in the history of humanity: the mountains of the Moon, sunspots, the phases of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter and the infinite stars of the Milky Way. A new look at the universe destined to radically change the geocentric cosmological conception in favor of the Copernican hypothesis.

The visual exploration of space continues today through the eye of satellites and the large space telescopes, Hubble and James Webb. The images captured by space telescopes will close the picture of the great adventure that began with Galileo's telescope. The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to three astronomical observatories built by contemporary artists - Hannsjörg Voth, Charles Ross and Lorenzo Reina - who conceived architectures to transform the observation of the sky into an aesthetic and sensorial experience.

The exhibition is underway at the Santa Maria Novella Complex, a former dormitory