The Mysteries of the Observatory of Villa Toeplitz

www.binomania.itAlthough there is extensive documentation on the Toeplitzes' home and life, information about the observatory and its astronomical instruments is so limited that I was forced to undertake a thorough investigation. I spent many days consulting local libraries and historical archives, contacting experts in the history of astronomy, and even visiting a well-known seminary in the province of Varese and purchasing books in Polish!

By Piergiovanni Salimbeni

This article is also available on the website: www.binomania.it, always property of the author.

 

There are many people I have to thank, and they will all be mentioned at the end of this article.

 

The villa

The luxurious home perched on the hill at the foot of the Sacro Monte di Varese was built in the late 19th century as a country residence for a German family. Polish banker Giuseppe Toeplitz, administrative director of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, purchased it around the time of World War I, and from the very beginning, undertook excellent improvements.

 

Thanks to the collaboration of the Parisian Studio L Collin A.Adam & C. Landscape Architects The park was expanded. They built a monumental staircase in Cuasso al Monte porphyry, canals, and wonderful water features, among which mosaic fountains made of gray Carrara marble still stand out today. 

The park, currently open to the public, is characterised by an incredible variety of plant species, including exotic ones, which are a perfect trait d'union with the geometry of the pools and fountains that recall the gardens of the Mongol emperors.

Edvige Toeplitz.
These improvements depended, more than anything, on the passion of Jadwiga Mrozowska, Italianized with the name of Evdige who became the second wife of the commendatore after a period of widowhood.

“"Donna Edvige" was the daughter of Polish landowners and received a strictly classical education. In 1900, she made her acting debut on the stage of the Warsaw Municipal Theater. She married a landowner and court employee that same year, but the marriage lasted only three years. At the outbreak of World War I, she served as a nurse, and at the end of the conflict, she attempted to move to Italy but was imprisoned in Perugia. Giuseppe Toeplitz had her released, fell in love with her, and married her in 1928.

 

Hedwig, having become "Mrs. Toeplitz," changed her habits and passions; she devoted herself to the study of mathematics and astronomy and began to embark on exploratory travels. Between 1919 and 1927, she traveled to Burma, India, Ceylon, Mesopotamia, Persia, Kashmir, and Tibet. Her journey to the Pamirs, on the border with Russia, led her to the discovery of a mountain pass that still bears her name today.

Thanks to this passion, he was responsible for the design of the park, as well as the construction of the astronomical observatory. It was built with the collaboration of Professor Emilio Bianchi (1875-1941), then director of the Brera Observatory, as well as creator of the Milan Planetarium and the Merate Observatory.

Her far-sighted passion for art, culture, and humanitarian missions transformed Villa Toeplitz into a hub for prominent figures and artists. Edvige was also acclaimed in various European cities, especially Paris, for her stunning lectures on travel and exotic gardens, delivered in fluent French. After her husband's death in 1936, Edvige sold the villa to brothers Giuseppe Giovan Battista and Carlo Mocchetti.

Subsequently, in 1972, it was sold to the municipality of Varese. Currently, Villa Augusta, on top of which the Specola is installed, was sold to the Insubric University. The lower floors house a conference room and a branch of the Physics faculty.

 

Given the importance of the family, but also of the splendid observatory overlooking Villa Augusta, I mistakenly thought I could easily acquire information about it and the equipment used by Donna Edvige Toeplitz.

Actually, it wasn't that simple!

 

Discovering the telescope

At first glance, it seemed to me that asking for information at the GV Schiaparelli Astronomical Observatory in Campo dei Fiori, Varese, was the most obvious choice.

In reality, I was only told that years ago, Professor Furia, the late director of the observatory, asked the municipality of Varese to remove the observatory to create another astronomical facility. Unfortunately, no one knew what equipment Mrs. Edvige used. I therefore thought it would be useful to inspect the observatory to determine if there were any traces—even on the pavement—that might indicate the presence of one or more telescopes.

After contacting the Varese historical archives, which possess a vast collection of information regarding Edvige Toeplitz's exploration activities, I was referred to the director of the Infrastructure and Logistics Department at the University of Insubria, who confirmed the observatory's unusable status and advised me to contact another colleague, responsible for maintenance of the university buildings, to see if there was any way to gain access. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for a response.

 

Searching for information in library archives and digital archives, I finally found a very interesting source: the sale to the Mochetti family concerned only the villa, while the "astronomical instruments" were donated by Donna Edvige to an important religious institute in the province of Varese.

Thanks to the collaboration of my friend Paolo Monti, a well-known collector of vintage binoculars and an employee at the Seminary of Venegono Inferiore, I learned that the monks had been keeping some telescopes for years.
 

I then contacted Don Natale Castelli, the physics professor at the Seminary High School, now closed since 2002, who confirmed the presence of an antique telescope in the physics lab. My eyes lit up! I didn't have the courage to ask further questions and immediately asked if I could go and examine it.

Fortunately the four laboratories have been reopened and he is the contact person for this project, as well as being the curator of the site.  http://www.fisicainvideo.it/ together with Don Adriano Sandri. For this reason, we agreed, choosing a day when he was busy with external school groups.

I brought with me my friend and companion on many planetary observations, Federico Caro, a long-focus telescope enthusiast and owner of a stunning Zeiss AS 150 mm f/15. Federico would have been an excellent judge. above the parties capable of curbing my involvement. I was, in fact, very keen to discover what was kept, at the time, in the observatory at Villa Toeplitz, which I could only have forced to confirm with mere suppositions.

The telescope

The warm rays of sunlight on a bright late October morning filtered through the ancient trees on the avenue leading to the seminary. Arriving in front of the seminary, I found the only free parking space under one of the building's large windows. I got out of the car and almost jumped: I could glimpse a "long tube" inside! Unknowingly, we had arrived under the physics classroom, and Don Castelli was already tinkering with the instrument so we could admire it. Perhaps that was the telescope that had belonged to Donna Toeplitz!

 As soon as we entered, we were greeted by the professor and Piero Fanchin, one of his collaborators who had cared for the telescope over the years. I received official confirmation that it was—without a doubt—the telescope that belonged to the famous Polish explorer.

The seminary was very accommodating: they gave us the opportunity to examine it, photograph it, and observe it, even though it was daytime. In the following days, I received further confirmation: Don Castelli's colleague, Don Andriano Sandri, gave me some very interesting information, and once again I was amazed by the coincidences.

He knew a person who had made astronomical observations with that telescope and his name was Don Elio Gentili… my former chemistry professor whom I hadn't seen for almost thirty years!
For the record, I cannot fail to point out that Don Elio is a well-known entomologist, an expert on hydrophilids of the Laccobius genus.
In the following days I also made an appointment with him and he was even more precise, he told me, in fact, that the telescope was donated in 1947 by Edvige Toeplitz to ’Don Silvio“, her former physics professor and that my professor used it in the 1950s, when he was a high school student in the seminary.

 At the time, they observed mostly in spring and summer. It was stored outside, under a doorway, and was dismantled annually in its original wooden crates. Dozens of accessories had also been donated (I only saw one eyepiece, and everyone confirmed that there was no longer any trace of the accessories). Don Elio fondly recalled the lunar and planetary observations he made with Donna Toeplitz's telescope. It seems that he and Don Silvio had also built a Newtonian telescope (now stored in another laboratory) and that they wanted to create an observatory atop the seminary's bell tower for the dissemination of astronomy. They also contacted a blacksmith from Tradate to construct the dome. However, the proposal was rejected by Monsignor Bernardo Citterio, who preferred not to have further outside visits, thus relegating Edvige Toeplitz's telescope to mere occasional use.

The cataloging

I admit that the first feature I noticed, and perhaps Federico did too, was the telescope's objective. With a tape measure and caliper in hand, we verified a diameter of 125 mm and a focal aperture of f/15. There were no markings on the cell, but fortunately an engraving near the focuser was still clearly visible, highlighting: "La Filotecnica-MILANO".

The Saimoiraghi Filotecnica

Ignazio Porro, the inventor of the prism of the same name, was born in Pinerolo on November 25, 1801. At a very young age, he embarked on a military career, where he rapidly advanced thanks to his genius: at just 24 years old, in fact, he was already a captain in the Engineers' Corps and had created the tacheometer, an instrument capable of carrying out topographical surveys with precision.
 After a brief stint opening two small workshops, he founded Filotecnica in Milan in 1865. In addition to producing these instruments for geodesy, he opened a school of optics and a new laboratory for the creation of measuring instruments. One of his students, Angelo Salmoiraghi, joined the company in 1870 and took it over two years before his mentor's death in 1875.

Thanks to Salmoiraghi's inventiveness, the small workshop quickly transformed into a large company producing optical and precision instruments.

In fact, its catalog also included some equatorial refracting telescopes ranging from 380 to 110 millimeters in diameter.

After comparing some period catalogues, I finally found out that the telescope installed in the observatory of Villa Toeplitz in Varese was a long-focus achromatic refractor “Filotecnica Salmoiraghi” with a diameter of 125 mm and opened at F/15 (?) as visible on this page of the Summary Catalogue of the company “La Filotecnica” Ing.A Salmoiraghi & C ” kindly provided by Marco Bensi, restorer and collector of period optical instruments. .

This telescope is important from a historical point of view, not only because it is Italian-made, but also because there are no other astronomical instruments branded Filotecnica.
 A similar refractor is owned by the well-known collector of vintage telescopes, Massimiliano Lattanzi, who restored one a few years ago. You can see the various stages of his painstaking work on the following page: http://www.refractorland.org/instruments/Salmoiraghi.htm

The cost. Including six eyepieces, it was 5,000 lire (presumably without the mount), given that the average worker's salary was 350 lire. It was certainly a good investment, not to mention the money spent on the mount and other accessories.
Luckily, the Toeplitz family had no shortage of money.

I greatly appreciated the details of this instrument, from the fine clockwork movements to the walnut tube, the knurled knobs, the brass mechanisms, and even the small magnifiers (in silver!) for effortlessly viewing the graduated circles. A brief analysis, unfortunately during the day, also led me to believe that this Filotecnica was a CE-defined objective, meaning perfectly achromatic in the red-green range, but it did exhibit a blue halo around Mars. Schiaparelli enthusiasts will recall that the beloved astronomer often used a red filter to eliminate this problem.
 Edvige's telescope was built around the same time as the exploits of Savigliano's famous planetary scientist and Percival Lowell. Indeed, there was a real trend in building telescopes optimized for observing Mars.

I hope to be able to observe the "red planet" myself, sooner or later, with this instrument which, as can be seen in the photographs, although well preserved, would at least require proper cleaning of the achromatic doublet which has equally shown good sharpness of the daytime details framed.

 

I assume that Mrs. Edvige Toeplitz purchased it in the 1930s, given that by analyzing the documentation present in the rich historical archive of Varese (thanks also to the patience and collaboration of the archivist Mario Bianchi) I found the project of the Soc.An.Luig Grandi (photo) dated 1924, where one can note the absence of the dome that would later be built above the square tower.

I also found further confirmation of the friendly relationship between Emilio Bianchi and Edvige Toeplitz in his book ”Oriental Visions” (I can

(I am referring to a 1930 edition published by Mondadori) where on page 46, it expressly cites: “from my illustrious friend the astronomer Professor Emilio Bianchi”.

My dream?

Well, definitely restoring the telescope, managing to bring it back to the Observatory, which should be finely restored, creating a small museum dedicated to Donna Toeplitz and an association to organize cultural and astronomical events.

Anyone who would like to discuss this project with me can contact me. by filling out the online form

 

RThere are still some mysteries to be solved!
Did the dome house other instruments?
Who built it?
What do you notice at minute 1:14 of a well-known Italian film from the 1960s, set in the Villa?
You will find out in the second part of this article.

 

Acknowledgements
Even if many editors do not understand the work that goes into a "simple article", a lot of time and even some money has been spent on its writing, also thanks to the support, patience and expertise of these people, whom I publicly thank:

Paolo Monti, Massimiliano Lattanzi of http://refractorland.org/ and Giuliano Talloni, collectors and experts in vintage astronomical telescopes
Father Natale Castelli and Father Adriano Sandri of the Seminary of Venegono Inferiore
Luisa Beatrice Negri, writer and journalist
Chiara Cattaneo and Luca Buzzi of the Campo dei Fiori Astronomical Observatory in Varese
Luca Molinari, Professor of Physics
Marco Castiglioni of the Castiglioni Museum in Varese
Carlos Ferrario and Rita Brilli, granddaughter and daughter of the gardener of Villa Toeplitz
Marco Bensi, historian of Filotecnica
Guido Montanari of the Historical Archives and curator of the Archival Heritage of the Banca Commerciale Italiana
Mario Bianchi of the historical archive of Varese
Marco Catalani and Oriana Pagano of LuxOttica
Dr. Ferruccio Maruca
Don Elio Gentili