Portraits below
National Laboratories of the Gran Sasso. June 2016
Photographs by
Antonio Di Cecco e Claudio Cerasoli
Curated by
Maria Francesca Palmerio
The Gran Sasso massif stands out against the city of L'Aquila, it can be seen every time you look up in the right direction. In addition to the splendour of the peaks, there is a vital and international reality also inside the mountain, where not even cosmic rays arrive, shielded by a thousand and four hundred meters of rock. The Gran Sasso National Laboratories are today the largest underground laboratories in the world, the only ones that can be found inside a park (Gran Sasso and Monti della Laga National Park). They were founded by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics for the study of particle physics. The underground structures, which consist of three large experimental rooms, 100 meters long, 20 meters wide and 18 meters high each, and a service tunnel, for a total volume of approximately 180,000 cubic meters, are located on one side of a motorway tunnel, 10 kilometers long, which crosses the Gran Sasso, towards Teramo - Rome. Thirty years of activity will be celebrated in June 2017.
