The permanent Oriented World Globe installation at Roma Tre University

The Oriented World Globe (or Parallel Globe) is a common terrestrial globe whose axis is inclined with respect to horizontal plane at an angle equal to the latitude of the site (for Roma approximately 42°) and oriented along the meridian. I this way the axis will point towards North Celestial Pole, N.P. (Fig. 1) and will result parallel to the terrestrial axis. Placing the line of the meridian of the site represented on the globe map in coincidence with the true local meridian, the globe will show in real time the pattern of illumination of the Earth’s surface and its diurnal and seasonal variations. Since the terrestrial radius is negligible respect to the Earth-Sun distance, with good approximation we can consider the globe to be placed in the centre of the Celestial Sphere. Nevertheless such a Ptolemaic view, the globe turns out to be an ideal tool for a modern interdisciplinary teaching and meaningful learning of Astronomy, Geometry, Mathematics, Physics and Natural Sciences. For this reason small oriented world globe are commonly used in educational activities at school. The globe located in the centre of the Chiostro garden of the Physics Department E. Amaldi has been designed following the criteria recently proposed in the field of Architecture (Bozic et al. 2005) on the possible direct educational role of the indoor and outdoor spaces of schools and universities when these are arranged according to the principles of hands-on experiments.