Giuseppe Campani

Giuseppe Campani (1635 to 1715) was an Italian optician and astronomer who lived in Rome in the latter half of the seventeenth century, an Umbrian from Castel San Felice near Spoleto. Known as the best maker of optical instruments of his age, he and his brother Matteo Campani-Alimenis were experts in grinding and polishing lenses, especially for very long focal length aerial telescope objectives, and his lenses and telescopes were sent as far as Florence and Paris. Louis XIV ordered several long-focus lenses of 86, 100 and 136 feet for the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, with which Cassini found several moons of Saturn, and Constantijn Huygens Jr. acquired one of his telescopes. Campani also made observations himself, disputing with Eustachio Divini the priority for the discovery of the spots on Jupiter that Cassini had called to his attention, and described his instruments and observations in publications of 1664 to 1666. He was a priest in charge of a parish in Rome, and his entire workshop was donated to the Gabinetto di Fisica of the Academy of Sciences of the Bologna Institute in 1747.