  We present a project to map the artificial sky brightness in Europe in the
main astronomical photometrical bands with a resolution better than 3 km. The
aim is to understand the state of night sky pollution in Europe, to quantify
the present situation and to allow future monitoring of trends. The artificial
sky brightness in each site at a given position on the sky is obtained by the
integration of the contributions produced by every surface area in the
surroundings of the site. Each contribution is computed taking in account the
propagation in the atmosphere of the upward light flux emitted by the area and
measured from DMSP satellites. The project is a long term study in which we
plan to take in account successively of many different details in order to
improve the maps. We present, as a preliminary result, a map of the V-band
artificial sky brightness in Italy in 1998 and we compare it with the map
obtained 27 years earlier by Bertiau, Treanor and De Graeve. Predictions for
the artificial sky brightness within the next 27 years are also shown.
