Via Romana 17, ☎ +39 055 2756444.
Full price €6, reduced
(ages between 6/14 or over 65, school groups) €3, free for children
under 6, guides, University of Florence and other categories.
Tue-Sun 9:30-16:30 (but 1 June-30 September from 10:30-17:30),
closed 1 January, Easter, 1 May, 15 August, 25 December.
"La Specola", in via Romana in Florence, is one of the headquarters of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence and is the heir of the oldest scientific museum in Europe to be open to the public. In particular, the central nucleus of the collections was located in this building (palazzo Torrigiani, formerly Bini) when the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History was established in 1775, while today, after the separation of the collections, it houses two distinct collections: the zoological with examples of animals preserved mainly through straw, and the anatomical one, with wax models dating back mostly to the eighteenth century. The name of the Specola refers to the observatory that the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo installed in the turret, where the Florence meteorological station Museo La Specola was also located.
In 1771, Grand Duke Peter Leopold (1747–1792) decided to bring
together the grand ducal natural history collections in Florence and –
inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment – to make them accessible to
the public. He entrusted the task of reorganization to Felice Fontana
(1730-1805), a natural scientist, anatomist and physicist who had been
in charge of the Medicean Chamber of Art and Curiosities in the Palazzo
Pitti since 1766 on behalf of the Grand Duchy. In 1771, Peter Leopold
acquired the Torrigiani family's palazzo on Via Romana, not far from the
Pitti Palace, along with a number of adjoining buildings, and had the
complex converted for the collection. The Grand Duke financed his museum
by selling valuable objects belonging to the Medici, although these had
been bequeathed to the city of Florence in a will. The basic stock of
the museum was made up of the stocks of the Uffizi, the curiosities from
the Medici chambers of curiosities as well as the instruments and
implements of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and the Accademia del Cimento,
founded in 1667 by Galileo's students. In the spirit of an overall view
of animal, plant and human existence, Felice Fontana, appointed director
by Peter Leopold, initiated the creation of anatomical models made of
wax, which were created in collaboration with artists, anatomists and
craftsmen.
On February 21, 1775, the collection was opened as the
Imperial Regio Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale (Imperial-Royal Museum
of Physics and Natural History). There were separate visiting hours for
the educated and for the people who had to appear in "clean clothes". In
order to expand the museum to include meteorological and astronomical
stocks, Peter Leopold had an Osservatorio Astronomico (Italian: la
specola) built in 1780, which later gave the entire museum its name.
Under Ferdinand III. (1769–1824), the museum lost its rank as an
important place of European knowledge. The University of Florence
emerged in 1923 from the founding of the Istituto di Studi Superiori e
di Perfezionamento (Institute for Higher Studies and Continuing
Education) in 1859. Today, La Specola belongs to the university as one
of six departments of the Museo di Storia Naturale with its building in
Via Romana, now the Institute for Physics and Natural Sciences, and has
the official name Museo di Storia Naturale dell'Università di Firenze,
sezione die zoologia La Specola.
The collections cover almost all species of the animal kingdom.
Invertebrates
Room II - Porifera and Coelenterates (sponges,
corals and jellyfish)
Particularly interesting is the so-called
Cestello di Venere, a highly sought-after sponge (Euplectella
aspergillum), considered in the Philippines or Japan as a symbol of
conjugal fidelity.
Room III - Molluscs
Also exhibited here are
some mother-of-pearl objects and other types of shells from the Medici
collections.
Room IV - Arthropods (Insects)
The showcases on
Lepidoptera (butterflies), both Italian and tropical, on beetles,
including a Titan beetle from the Amazon (about 18 cm) are beautiful.
Room V - Arthropods (particularly arachnids) and crustaceans
Notable
are some giant crustaceans from Mexico, and some rare or semi-extinct
species.
Room VI - Worms, terrestrial, marine and parasitic.
Room
VII - Echinoderms (urchins and sea stars).
Reptiles
Room VIII
- Turtles (some giant specimens from the Galápagos) and crocodiles
There is also a crocodile mummified in Ancient Egypt, which arrived in
Florence following the expedition of Ippolito Rosellini in 1828-29.
Room IX - Amphibians and Squamates (Saurians and Snakes)
There is a
cast of a giant salamander from Japan, which lived in the Museum from
1875 to 1918.
Fish
Room X - Fish (sawfish beaks, sturgeon,
kingfish, etc.)
Room XI - Fish (sharks, living fossils, etc.)
Birds
Room XVI and XVII - Italian birdlife (virtually complete
collection, with numerous rarities)
Room XVII - Nests
Room XIX -
Birds from all over the world, with a showcase of extinct breeds from
the 18th to the 20th century.
One of the largest rooms, with examples
of ostriches, parrots, hummingbirds, etc.
Room XX - Room of the
Paradisee
Also this very large and recently rearranged with new
showcases, contains the most spectacular specimens of the class of birds
(Del Paradiso and Giardinieri)
Mammals
Systematically divided,
there are many known species, with particular regard to the more exotic
ones: African herbivores (many species of antelope), a rare specimen of
white rhinoceros, felines from all over the world. A real curiosity is
the so-called stuffed Boboli hippopotamus, an exotic gift from the
second half of the eighteenth century to the Grand Duke, who lived for a
few years in the Boboli garden and which was then stuffed, however,
being a unique specimen never seen before, it was arbitrarily recomposed
according to the imagination of the craftsman, who erroneously modeled
the paws with a kind of canine foot.
In the Sala del "Conte di
Torino" some of the many hunting trophies donated to the museum by the
Royal Family of the House of Savoy (rhinos, antelopes, baboons...) are
displayed; a tooth of a narwhal, an arctic cetacean, is also exposed.
Showcase Somalia - Recently renovated, it exhibits a diorama with
specimens from those areas.
Marsupials - Kangaroos, possums and the
thylacine, a Tasmanian marsupial that became extinct around 1930.
Primates - Amazonian monkeys, anthropomorphic apes.
Unique in the world for antiquity and vastness (there is a copy in
Vienna, made by the same hands of the Florentine technicians), it was
wanted by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo and by the first director of
the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History Felice Fontana with the
aim of teaching the anatomy three-dimensionally, without the need to
always resort to the dissection of cadavers. The statues and models, all
in wax and incredibly realistic, were made between 1771 and the second
half of the 19th century and amount to about 1400, of which those on
display are only a part (some are also at the Faculty of Medicine at
Careggi and at the Galileo Museum). For conservation, the waxes require
a constant temperature around eighteen degrees.
Particularly
suggestive are the whole figures, including the Spellato, a body
stretched out with visible muscles and blood vessels, up to the
capillaries made by sliding the wax with silk threads. Corpses from the
Archhospital of Santa Maria Nuova were used as models, from which clay
models were made to make plaster casts into which the mixture of waxes,
resins and dyes was then poured. Of great scientific interest are the
models of pathological anatomy, which show us the conditions of health
at the end of the eighteenth century.
Many of the waxes were
performed by Clemente Susini and his students in the Florentine wax
modeling workshop.
Plague Waxes
Gaetano Giulio Zumbo was a
Sicilian wax modeller whose works, commissioned by Grand Duke Cosimo III
de' Medici between 1691 and 1694, came together in this museum due to
the affinity of materials, even if much older and not exclusively
anatomical. They are small grotesque representations of a macabre and
frightening taste typical of the seventeenth century, which portray the
effects of the plague, with particular attention to the horror and
decomposition of bodies. They come from the Galileo Museum, where they
were badly damaged following the flood in Florence, but fortunately
almost all of them could be restored with a patient and skilful
restoration.
Galileo's Tribune
It is a rare example of the
neoclassical style in the city. It was inaugurated in 1841 by Grand Duke
Leopold II of Lorraine for the III Congress of Italian Scientists, and
features a large statue of Galileo and some paintings dedicated to
scientific knowledge (for example by Nicola Cianfanelli). Some of the
great scientist's scientific instruments were once displayed here
together with the collections of the Accademia del Cimento, which are
now in the Museo Galileo.
In 1998 the room served as a television
studio for the live broadcast of the documentary series Journey into the
Cosmos, conducted by Piero Angela and attended by various guests of the
moment, such as Franco Pacini, Margherita Hack and others.
Skeleton Hall
The "Hall of skeletons" is open only on special
occasions, or with a guided tour by reservation. It preserves the
skeletons of numerous animal species, among which the reconstructions of
elephants and that of a humpback whale, the largest in an Italian
museum, stand out. There are also pieces of a skeleton of a sperm whale,
stranded on the Livorno coast in the 19th century. The display cases
contain complete skeletons of numerous species of birds, fish, reptiles
and mammals, including numerous monkeys and three human, man, woman and
child skeletons.
The astronomical tower
Designed at the end of
the 18th century, the Torrino was an astronomical observatory. It is
made up of various rooms, but the most important rooms are the Sala
della Meridiana, where the passages of celestial bodies were observed,
and the Upper Octagonal Room, from which observations of the sky were
carried out at 360 degrees. It houses a sampling of objects from the
Medici collections, life-size wax models of plants and flowers dating
back to the 18th century, some sheets from the Central and Cesalpino
Herbarium, two painted canvases by Bartolomeo Bimbi.