Hanging from the ceiling above the centre of the dining room at La Meridiana is the armillary sphere. The ancient Greek astronomers working in Egypt believed the sun went round the earth and this belief persisted until about 1500 when Copernicus argued otherwise. The great rings we know on the earth, (tropics, equator, arctic circle, ecliptic etc.) were to them in the heavens on the celestial sphere, a gigantic globe made of crystal, imagined by them to be holding the sun as it revolved around the earth. The tropic (Greek to turn) of Cancer was where the sun turned from midsummer towards autumn, the equator was where the sun passed when night (nox) was equal in length to day (the ‘equinox’), the arctic circle ran through the constellation of the great Bear (Arktos is Greek for bear). They observed that the eclipses took place in an imaginary band on the sphere wider than the path of the sun. This they called the ecliptic band. They also reasoned that the sun lay between the earth and certain different constellations at different times of the year – the twelve signs of the zodiac.
Hence the sphere of rings, the armillary, derived from the latin for a ring, a model of our sun and her earth, but of course the earth rotates the sun. In Cairo in the 11th century they made an armillary of bronze hoops, each large enough for a man on horseback to jump through.
The model is correct with the sun at the centre and the earth moving around it, but imagine the sun is where the earth is, and all will be clear with the Greek misunderstanding.