  The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a large collaborative effort aimed at
the design and operation of an observatory dedicated to very high-energy
gamma-ray astrophysics in the energy range from a few tens of GeV to above 100
TeV, which will yield about an order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity
with respect to the current major arrays (H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS). Within
this framework, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics is leading the
ASTRI project, whose main goals are the design and installation on Mt. Etna
(Sicily) of an end-to-end dual-mirror prototype of the CTA small size telescope
(SST) and the installation at the CTA Southern site of a dual-mirror SST
mini-array composed of nine units with a relative distance of about 300 m. The
innovative dual-mirror Schwarzschild-Couder optical solution adopted for the
ASTRI Project allows us to substantially reduce the telescope plate-scale and,
therefore, to adopt silicon photo-multipliers as light detectors. The ASTRI
mini-array is a wider international effort. The mini-array, sensitive in the
energy range 1-100 TeV and beyond with an angular resolution of a few arcmin
and an energy resolution of about 10-15%, is well suited to study relatively
bright sources (a few $\times 10^{-12}$erg cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ at 10 TeV) at very
high energy. Prominent sources such as extreme blazars, nearby well-known BL
Lac objects, Galactic pulsar wind nebulae, supernovae remnants, micro-quasars,
and the Galactic Center can be observed in a previously unexplored energy
range. The ASTRI mini-array will extend the current IACTs sensitivity well
above a few tens of TeV and, at the same time, will allow us to compare our
results on a few selected targets with those of current (HAWC) and future
high-altitude extensive air-shower detectors.
