About 8 kilometers from the town of Montone, in the luxuriant vegetation of the Pietralunga forest in the Carpina Valley, is a small hamlet called Coloti. Abandoned in the 1960s, it has been brought back to life more recently thanks to a project to build an observatory there (Osservatorio Astronomico).
Financed by the European Economic Community in 1995, the Umbria region began a project to build an observatory and chose this spot as the ideal place for it because of the clean air and absence of any light pollution in the valley.
The project, completed in 2000, made it possible to build one of the most advanced observatories in Italy that works on a system of automatic functions (it does not require a human’s presence during the night).
The observatory outside Coloti is a large structure today, having twelve rooms, eight of which are open to the public, plus the ex-church of the hamlet dedicated to St Lorenzo now used for meeting rooms and a modern wing called ‘Sirio’, where there are things for your entertainment and a caffè. It is all surmounted by the large seven-meter diameter dome with its telescope.