Dear Nicola, Thank you for your message. I enjoyed your photographs of the dial that you saw on vacation in Ravello:
> http://gnomonices.blogspot.com/ You say that the dial appears to be marked out correctly for a horizontal sundial at the Latitude of London. Let me speculate... The gardens of the Villa Cimbrone in Ravello were laid out by Lord Grimthorpe, who was a noted Englishman in the mid-19th century. Lord Grimthorpe knew about many things (though not always as well as he imagined). He certainly knew about sundials and clocks. He designed the Great Clock at Westminster which is incorrectly referred to as Big Ben. It is possible that he had a favourite sundial in London (latitude 51 deg 30') which he wanted to set up in Ravello (latitude 40 deg 40'). This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do... You just prop up the south edge of the dial so the dial plate, in Ravello, slopes downwards to the north at an angle of 10 deg 50' to the horizontal. I can imagine the instructions being misinterpreted and the local gardener propped up the north edge instead of the south edge. Also, he got the wrong angle and propped it up by the latitude instead of the *difference* in latitude. Of course, these mistakes would have the dial sloping at 40 deg 40' which is a little more than the slope in your photographs but I guess this gardener wasn't very good at using a protractor either :-) It is not uncommon to move a sundial... When the Royal Greenwich Observatory moved from Hurstmonceux Castle to Cambridge they took a sundial with them. They set this up on a concrete platform which was inclined to the horizontal by an angle of 1 deg 21'. This (correctly) compensated for the change in latitude. Sadly, the Observatory has now moved from Cambridge but you can still see the concrete platform. On Google Earth it is at: 52 deg 12' 53.80 N 0 deg 5' 45.57 E I hope this starts off a more serious discussion about this curious sundial!! Best wishes Frank King Cambridge, U.K. --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
