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Focus 15: Gallery Talks by Students

Autumn, 1997






THANKS to an initiative from two students on the Museum’s M.Sc. course – Paola Bertucci and Ilaria Meliconi – instant expertise was on offer to visitors to the Museum during August. For four consecutive weeks the students offered daily gallery talks to visitors. Each was strictly limited to just fifteen minutes and focused on a single type of instrument, selected from among the astrolabe, the quadrant, the nocturnal, the telescope, the electrical machine and the spectroscope.


Intriguing titles, such as ‘Hung and Quartered: the Quadrant’, were success fully matched by student enthusiasm, with the result that a programme originally intended to run for only a week was extended stepwise to fill a month as the result of popular demand.