Opening of the Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo in Palazzo Cavalli, Padua, Italy

Abstract

The new Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo, which exhibits 200,000 natural and anthropological relics from the University of Padua, has been inaugurated last summer and is now Italy’s largest university museum. Located between the historic Palazzo Cavalli and a modern purpose-built building, the Museum houses four of the University of Padua’s historical collections, those of Mineralogy, Geology and Palaeontology, Zoology and Anthropology. In addition to the room that displays rare fluorescent minerals, the one in which two-metre-long ichthyosaur fossils are exhibited, and the display case with a saber-toothed tiger that lived 2 million years ago, one of the most exciting rooms is the Hall of the Palms, a Palaeolithic jungle. Its walls are entirely covered by huge stone slabs imprinted with fossils of the foliage of the tropical plants that covered nowadays Veneto 50 million years ago.

For more information on the museum, https://visitmnu.it/en/