Address: Via Romana, 17
Like most Florentine museums "La Specola" has its
origins in the Medici period, even though it was founded in 1775.
The Medici collected natural treasures like fossils, animals,
minerals and exotic plants with the same passion they applied to
great works of art. It was the enlightened Pietro Leopoldo of
Lorraine who decided on the creation of a Museum of Natural
history complete with library which would be open to the public.
With this in mind he bought in 1771 the group of buildings near
the
Pitti Palace in which
"La Specola" is still situated, even though with major
modifications.
The collection's history is complex, with donations, partitions
and transfers of the contests between other scientific
institutes. At the moment only part of the collection is on show
to the public (on the second floor) while most of the collection
is spread out on five floors and is used in general for research
purposes. Connected with the collection of animals are
laboratories for taxidermy and research. The public may visit
twenty-five rooms where recent acquisitions and old examples of
taxidermy are on show, including the hippopotamus which appears
to have been given to the Grand Duke in the second half of the
eighteenth century who lived for several years in the Boboli
Gardens.
The museum is very proud of its collection of anatomical waxes,
an art introduced to Florence by Lodovico Cigoli (1559-1613) an
artist of some importance in Florence of that period. Such waxes
enjoyed their greatest perfection in the eighteenth century. The
best representative of wax sculpture in Florence was Clemente
Susini (1754-1814) who produced the best works in the collection
in the laboratory founded for that purpose next to the museum.
Here it is worth drawing attention to a unique room, the
so-called Tribune of Galileo designed and constructed in 1841 by
the architect Giuseppe Martelli in honour of the great Tuscan
scientist. It is decorated with frescoes and sculpted and inlaid
marbles illustrating some of the scientific discoveries of the
Italian Renaissance.
