Università di Firenze Museo Zoologico "La Specola"

Few museums anywhere are as uncanny as La Specola. On the Via Romana, a few steps from the Pitti Palace, room after room of 18th-century cabinets hold stuffed animals and, beyond them, one of the world's most celebrated collections of anatomical waxes: flayed bodies, dissected hearts, nerves and lymph vessels modelled with a precision that still unsettles visitors two centuries later. Founded in the 1770s, it is often described as the oldest scientific museum in Europe opened to the public, and its rooms preserve the spirit of the Enlightenment almost intact. Today it belongs to the University of Florence's natural history museum.

The museum was the creation of Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine, who in 1771 set up an Imperial and Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History in the Palazzo Torrigiani to show the public the curiosities gathered by generations of Medici: fossils, minerals, animals and exotic plants. It opened its doors in February 1775, at a time when almost every comparable collection was private. Its first director, the abbot and scientist Felice Fontana, sent expeditions abroad and set up a wax-modelling workshop in the building; the astronomical tower added in the late 18th century gave the museum its popular name, specola meaning observatory. In 1841 Grand Duke Leopold II inaugurated the Tribuna di Galileo, a richly decorated hall honouring Galileo and the Florentine tradition of experimental science.

The zoological collections run to millions of specimens, of which several thousand are on show, among them a hippopotamus that is said to have lived for a time in the Boboli Gardens and was stuffed by craftsmen with only a vague idea of what the animal should look like, and the skeleton of Hansken, a famous performing elephant of the 17th century. The wax rooms, laid out much as they were in the 18th century, hold around 1,400 pieces produced over about a century, many by the master modeller Clemente Susini, whose reclining anatomical Venus is the most famous; earlier, darker wax scenes by the Sicilian Gaetano Giulio Zumbo date from the late 17th century. The museum sits in Florence's Oltrarno, the artisan quarter south of the river, in the city that cradled the Renaissance and whose historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982.

Getting there

La Specola is at Via Romana 17 in the Oltrarno district of Florence, next to the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens and about 1.6 km from the city centre. Firenze Santa Maria Novella, the city's main railway station with high-speed trains to Rome, Milan and Venice, is about 2 km away. The nearest airport is Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR), about 6 km from the museum, with Pisa International Airport (PSA) as the larger regional alternative.