After about three years we returned to Cremona, a placid town lying on the banks of the Po.
The reason for the trip was the new museum located in the cathedral's bell tower.
The bell tower of the cathedral, better known as Torrazzo or Turass, became, in November 2018, a Vertical Museum dedicated to the measurement of time.

The only sore point is that to visit it you need to climb about 500 steps, something that not everyone can do, since Turass is among the highest bell towers in Europe (367 ft).

A couple of notes:
for the history of the city we refer to our precedent special "the city of the three T's", here we will briefly talk about the astronomical clock and the museum of the time.

The astronomical clock:
is the largest astronomical clock in the world with a dial that exceeds 8 m in diameter.
The clock was built from 1583 to 1588 by Francesco Divizioli and his son Giovan Battista.
In 1787 both the mechanism and the dial were repaired by Amiciono Ravizza who, later, published a description of the whole mechanism.
In addition, of course, to the hours, date, position of the Sun in the zodiac, it marks the eclipses of the Moon and those of the Sun given by the superposition of the Sun and the Moon on the rod of the Dragon, a very particular rod which completes a complete rotation every 18,61 years.

The vertical museum:
composed of some rooms, the Sala del Quadrante and the Sala del Meccanismo are dedicated to the mechanical characteristics of the clock.
In the Time Measurement Room the work of the Cremona engineer Janello Torriani “Artificio di Toledo” is also reproduced.
It was a complex mechanical system that regularly raised water from the Tagus river to the Alcázar fortress.
It consisted of a system of oscillating towers that covered a distance of 984 ft on an altitude difference of almost 328 ft.

For more info:
information brochure Vertical Museum [download pdf]
www.astrofili-cremona.it
http://www.diocesidicremona.it
www.osservatoriogalilei.com