The Relationship Between the Ramsden Circles at Palermo and Dunsink

摘要

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Bourbon Government established many scientific institutions in southern Italy, thanks to the support of a reformist movement founded on the principles of the French Enlightenment. At the time, Sicilian scientific culture was in a state of considerable backwardness, the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1767 having provoked the immediate collapse of the educational system.rnOne of the most important representatives of this movement was the Prince of Caramanico, Francesco D'Aquino, Viceroy of Sicily, who relaunched scientific instruction in the island in 1779 by creating the Accademia de' Regi Studi, which later became the University of Palermo. In 1786 he promoted the establishment of a chair of astronomy and appointed the mathematician Giuseppe Piazzi (1746-1826) as professor of mathematics, with the task of establishing an astronomical observatory in Palermo.