LAZZARO SPALLANZANI

Room 1 contains two preserved muscle anatomy models showing the inner workings of a horse and a deer. Rooms 2 to 4 are dedicated to the founding director of the museum, Lazzaro Spallanzani, whose travels and research in the 700s so enhanced its prestige. The work he is best known for includes the artificial insemination of animals, his confutation of the theory of spontaneous generation of microorganisms, investigations into bats’ ‘sixth sense’, and experiments on the regeneration of tissues and of entire organs – a subject at the forefront of modern biomedical research. The rooms also house some of the specimens Spallanzani acquired for the museum, including the stuffed mako shark and hippopotamus.

CARL LINNAEUS, ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AND GEORGES CUVIER

The exhibits in rooms 5 to 8 present the concepts at the basis of modern biology:

• modern taxonomy, which still uses the universal system of classification of nature devised by Linnaeus;
• biogeography, which started with Alexander von Humboldt’s observation of the distribution of living things as a function of their environment. Humboldt’s illustration of this idea can be seen along with some examples of natural environments.
• extinction: Georges Cuvier was the first to conclusively interpret the fossil remains of elephants and several other animals as belonging to species that were extinct.

The last part of this section deals with fossils and the mass extinctions of the past.

CHARLES DARWIN, MAN’S WAYS AND THE FUTURE

Room 9 presents Darwin’s theory of evolution and the birth of modern genetics as an introduction to the key modern-day issues of nature conservation and the future of the planet.
Rooms 10 and 11 display specimens of extinct and threatened animals. The complete southern white rhino skeleton is the only one to be found in an Italian museum.