Various generations of the Medici family had accumulated and gathered with passion in their private collections, in addition to great treasures, also a considerable patrimony of natural treasures, such as fossils, animals, minerals and exotic plants. On the basis of such materials as well as the acquisitions of new finds of every type, including a vast collection of books from all over Europe, the enlightened Peter Leopold of Lorraine, with the aid of the abbot Felice Fontana (1730-1805), created a Museum of Physics and Natural History for the public. To such ends, he bought a block of buildings near the Pitti Palace in 1771, in which “La Specola” still has its home today, despite notable modifications and adaptations. The Museum was officially inaugurated in 1775 and it was directed by Fontana until his death. Up to the early 19th century, it remained the only scientific Museum in the world created for the public and addressed towards all sorts of inquisitive people, with opening hours, guides and caretakers, as a museum is still conceived today. The vicissitudes of the collections are extremely complicated, especially because of the transfers of the anthropological, mineralogical, botanical and paleontological finds as well as the physics, chemistry and astronomy equipment to other university museums and institutes that occurred between 1860 and 1930.

Currently the public is admitted into 34 rooms, 24 of zoology and 10 of wax modeling. In the zoological sections, there are both recently acquired as well as ancient taxidermy specimens, like the hippopotamus which, as it seems, was given to the Grand Duke in the second half of the 1700’s, and lived for some years in the Boboli Gardens. The museum can especially boast its collection of anatomical waxworks, a precious testimony to an art which in Florence was first begun by Ludovico Cigoli (1559-1613), an important Florentine artist of that period, and had its moment of maximum splendor and scientific-technical accuracy in the 1700’s. The most important pieces in the collection were produced by Clemente Susini (1754-1814), the best of the Florentine wax modelers; they were produced in a workshop founded at the museum for that purpose. (By the second half of the 1800’s, it was no longer working.) Inside the wax modeling exhibition, we must point out the unique collection of the peculiar waxworks of Gaetano Zumbo (1656-1701), artistically and anatomically of great value.

Inside the Museum building, there are two other special rooms. One is the so-called “Galileo Tribune”, planned and built by the architect Giuseppe Martelli in 1841 to honor the memory of the great Tuscan scientist and to hold many of his instruments together with those from the Accademia del Cimento (which tod

y are kept at the Museum of the History of Science). The room is adorned with frescoes and sculpted inlaid marble which illustrate a number of Italian scientific discoveries from the Renaissance to Volta.

The Hall of the Skeletons, inaugurated in March 2001 after 5 years of restoration, displays the majority of the osteological, and especially mammalian, finds owned by the Museum. This enormously important scientific collection continues to increase even today and it is consulted regularly by both Italian and foreign zoologists and paleontologists. There are more than 3,000 finds in the hall, from skulls to complete skeletons, some even of very ancient provenance: the elephant’s skeleton was almost surely already present in the second half of the 1700’s. There are skeletons and skulls of very rare, even extinct animals, such as the Sonda Rhinoceros, a thylacine (or Tasmanian wolf), an echidna, a platypus and various giant ant-eaters. In addition, also primates and man are represented.

essential bibliography

Encyclopaedia Anatomica
Düring M. V., Didi Huberman G. - Poggesi M., Editore: ICONS.Taschen ed., 2001

Guida del Museo Zoologico La Specola - Università di Firenze
Poggesi M., Firenze, Editore: Ed. Polistampa, 2000

Encyclopaedia Anatomica
Düring M. V., Didi-Huberman G., Poggesi M., Editore: Taschen ed., 1999

Le Cere Anatomiche della Specola di Firenze
AA.VV., Firenze, Editore: Arnaud ed., 1997

The Anatomical waxes of La Specola
AA.VV., Firenze, Editore: Arnaud ed., 1995

Le cere e le terrecotte ostetriche del Museo di Storia della Scienza a Firenze
Zanca A., Firenze, Editore: Arnaud ed., 1981<br />
Le cere del Museo dell’Istituto Fiorentino di Anatomia Patologica
AA.VV., Firenze, Editore: Arnaud ed.