The Brera Observatory is an astronomical observatory in the Brera district of Milan, Italy. It was built in the historic Palazzo Brera in 1764 by the Jesuit astronomer Roger Boscovich. Following the suppression of the Jesuits by Clement XIV on 21 July 1773, the palace and the observatory passed to the then rulers of northern Italy, the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. Following the independence of Italy in 1861, the observatory has been run by the Italian government.
In 1862, the newly installed Italian government improved the observatory's facilities by commissioning a 218mm Merz Equatorial Refracting Telescope to the German constructor Georg Merz. In 1946 the observatory became part of the scientific institutions of the new born Italian Republic and since 2001 it has become part of the National Institute of Astrophysics.
Astronomer Margherita Hack worked at the Observatory from 1954 to 1964, until she became Professor of the Institute of Physics at the Trieste University.
Today the Observatory's staff consists of approximatively one hundred people. The research area covers a large range of fields from planets to stars, black holes, galaxies, gamma-ray bursts and cosmology.