Bassano Bresciano

Bassano Bresciano is a village on the plain between Brescia and the Po, all fields and farmsteads, crossed in Roman times by the via Brixiana that linked the river port of Cremona to Brixia. And yet the village's name does not travel the earth: it orbits the Sun. At the observatory built here, listed by the Minor Planet Center under code 565, four minor planets have been discovered, and the first was given the village's own name: 6460 Bassano. Another is called 22370 Italocalvino.

The forty-two-centimetre Schmidt telescope came into service on 29 April 1989, though the first measurements had already been published in 1983 with a fifteen-centimetre instrument. Today the observatory works right through the night on its own, controlled from a distance, and since 2011 it has received gamma-ray burst alerts from satellites. Lombardy's regional law protects it from light pollution: here darkness is a public good.