An open-air museum, dominated by an expanse of 170 antennas belonging to the “Piero Fanti” Space Centre across 370,000 square metres of the Fucino plain. Here, shaded by willow trees, the Telespazio Museum illustrates the milestones and main achievements of the company’s history and that of the Italian space industry.

Founded in 1986, the Museum preserves instruments and devices that trace the evolution of satellite telecommunications and related technologies that, still today, make a decisive contribution to the betterment of life on our Planet. Around 50 objects are exhibited, including oscilloscopes, antennas, signal generators, mobile stations and different types of multiplex. This is a symbolic place because it was from here, in the summer of 1969, that Telespazio’s antennas helped broadcast footage of the first man on the Moon.

Next to the museum, in a moon-like landscape created by the rows of parabolas, is a historical relic that bears witness to another great technological achievement: the stern, propeller and rudder of the Elettra, the ship on which Guglielmo Marconi performed important short-wave radio experiments as from 1923. In this flat expanse, the sky and sea seem to merge together.
The ship, built in the early 20th century and bought by Marconi in 1919, became a floating laboratory. A relic of war and sunk in 1944 by British troops, it was taken apart and donated to various scientific/cultural institutions and ports in central and northern Italy. The two sections in the square in front of the Museum were donated to Telespazio in 1978 by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

Telespazio, a Leonardo Group company, thus enables us to travel through the history of technology, between space and telecommunications, in a place that played a leading role in the birth of the Internet. The Museum is a fascinating place to visit, first and foremost for researchers and students.