The Giancarlo Ligabue Museum of Natural History of Venice, until 30 October 2019 Civic Museum of Natural History, is located inside the Fondaco dei Turchi, the important palace in Venice overlooking the Grand Canal.
It was founded with a decree of the Municipality of Venice in 1923
which designates the Fondaco dei Turchi as the seat of the museum. The
Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts also participated in the
project, providing some naturalistic collections donated by its members,
previously kept in the Palazzo Loredan headquarters. The inauguration
took place in 1932.
With a resolution of the municipal council of
24 July 2019, the museum was named after the archaeologist Giancarlo
Ligabue; the unveiling ceremony of the plaque was held on October 30,
2019.
In 2011 the building was delivered completely renovated and the
museum itinerary was renewed with 16 new rooms, a new garden and a
new entrance area. The new cetacean gallery has been set up on the
ground floor. The main rooms of the new route are the following:
Room of the Ligabue scientific expedition - Dedicated to the
scientific expedition of the archaeologist Giancarlo Ligabue to
Niger (Sahara Gadoufaoua) in 1972-1973, it presents many precious
finds including the skeleton of a dinosaur Ouranosaurus nigeriensis,
considered one of the most interesting finds in the world of this
type. The skeleton of a Sarcosuchus imperator, the largest crocodile
in history, was also placed next to it.
On the trail of life - It
includes five rooms that follow the path of life among the fossils,
starting from the first forms of life that appeared in the sea up to
the large animals present at the end of the glacial period in Italy
and in particular in the Veneto region, with a small final section
dedicated to man.
Gathering to amaze and to study - It represents
a section dedicated to the great explorers and collectors who have
contributed to creating the museum's scientific collections. These
are Giovanni Miani, Count Giuseppe De Reali and the anthropologist
and patron Giancarlo Ligabue. A reconstruction of a
sixteenth-seventeenth century wunderkammer leads to the exhibition
of museology in the modern sense, of the second half of the
eighteenth century Enlightenment, of Linneian classification and of
the analytical study of nature.
The path of life - Starting from
a circular multimedia room animated by a touchless computerized
system, which projects the images of hundreds of organisms that
lived on the planet in every environment like in a planetarium, the
visitor enters the last part of the path in which he crosses rooms
themes, dedicated to successive examples of declination, over time
and in different environments, of the general theme of adapting the
forms of organisms to their needs. The visitor can thus read from
reality the infinite solutions developed by evolution over the
course of millions of years of the history of life on our planet.
Acquario delle tegnùe - Currently closed to the public. On the
ground floor, five meters long and capable of holding over 5,000
liters of sea water, it reproduces the extraordinary environment of
the tegnùe and their biodiversity, with over 50 animal species
including invertebrates and fish. A precise reconstruction of the
environment and an effective didactic structure allow you to admire
numerous live species, discovering the characteristics and
curiosities about the different aspects of the biology and behavior
of these animals guided by an easy game. The local denomination of
Tegnùe refers to those natural rocky outcrops that are distributed
discontinuously in the western area of the Gulf of Venice, in
bathymetric ranges between 8 and 40 m. The dimensions can be very
different, from a few square meters to several thousand, with
elevations from the seabed ranging from a few decimetres in the
basic "slab" formations, to a few meters in the higher ones, often
located at greater depths. Numerous geological studies have allowed
a characterization of the outcrops from a morphological and
structural point of view, essentially reducing them to three
different types: clastic sedimentary rocks, commonly known as
"beachrocks"; sedimentary rocks of chemical deposit; organogenic
rocks, i.e. rocks produced by the action of building organisms,
plants and animals. These rock formations can be traced back to
shallow carbonate platform facies in temperate-cold waters. The
presence of "islands" of solid substrates in the homogeneous expanse
of sandy/muddy bottoms creates, albeit locally, areas rich in
micro-environments and ecological gradients which favor an increase
in specific diversity in the populations. Thus "oases" of extreme
biological richness are created, with an increase in the number of
species present, but also with a considerable biomass per unit area.
Among the many species present are Porifera, Coelenterates,
Annelids, among which are very numerous the Serpulids which often
cover every available surface overlapping in successive layers. Even
among the Echinoderms there are numerous species typically present
in the Tegnùe biocoenoses. Finally, the presence of numerous species
of Tunicates is typical. Also valuable fish species such as the
Homarus gammarus lobster, the corvina Sciaena umbra, the croaker
Umbrina cirrosa, the cod Trisopterus minutus, the conger eel Conger
conger and the sea bass Dicentrarchus labrax are in fact
particularly frequent in these environments, which in fact represent
for some species, such as lobster, exclusive environments.
The library is a specialist center united with the museum research institute. It collects materials that have various origins and works by important Venetian naturalists such as Giovanni Domenico Nardo, Nicolò Contarini, Giovanni Miani and Antonio Carlo Dondi Dall'Orologio. Since 1923 its headquarters have been located at the Fondaco dei Turchi. The library has a very rich heritage consisting of ancient and modern books as well as material of various kinds.