Museum of Natural History, La Specola — Attraction in Florence

The Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze is a natural history museum in 6 major collections, located in Florence, Italy. It is part of the University of Florence. Museum collections are open mornings except Wednesday, and all day Saturday; an admission fee is charged.

The museum was established on February 21, 1775 by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo as the Imperial Regio Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale. At that time it consisted of several natural history collections housed within the palazzo Torrigiani on Via Romana. Through the past two centuries, it has grown significantly and now forms one of the finest collections in Italy.

Today's collections are as follows:

Giardino dei Semplici (Via Micheli, 3) - Europe's third oldest botanical garden, established in 1545, now containing some 9,000 plant specimens. Museo di Botanica (Via La Pira, 4) - a large herbarium of approximately 4 million specimens, including the historic collections of Andrea Cesalpino (1563), claimed to be the first scientific herbarium, Philip Barker Webb, and Odoardo Beccari.

Museo di Geologia e Paleontologia (Via La Pira, 4) - About 200,000 specimens from the collections of noted geologists and paleontologists (Fucini, Dainelli, Marinelli, De Stefani, Stefanini, D'Ancona, Pecchioli). The vertebrate fossil collection (26,000 specimens) is of particular interest, with mammal fossils from the Pliocene and Pleistocene, primarily recovered from Tuscany and Valdarno, including Oreopithecus bambolii, anthropoid primates, and early elephant skeletons. The paleobotany collection includes a further 8,000 items.

Museo di Mineralogia e Litologia (Via La Pira, 4) - About 50,000 specimens in a number of collections. Of particular interest are the earliest items from the Tribuna degli Uffizi (about 500 specimens), and the collection of Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti (about 5,000 items), cataloged in 12 manuscript volumes.

Museo Nazionale di Antropologia ed Etnologia (Palazzo Nonfinito. Via del Proconsolo, 12) - About 15,000 ethnological items and 6,100 anthropological items, with a photographic collection containing a further 26,000 prints and 7,000 negatives. The original collection was a cabinet of curiosities containing items such as an ivory horn from the Kingdom of Kongo, Persian insignia of command, and bows and arrows from the upper Amazon. It was notably augmented by items from Captain James Cook's voyages in the Pacific.

Zoologia "La Specola" (Via Romana, 17) - A major collection of some 3 million zoological specimens, of which about 5,000 are on public display, with a further 3,000 specimens in the hall of skeletons. The collection of wax anatomical models is of particular interest. It was begun in 1771 by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo and is said to be the largest such collection in the world; about 1,400 models are currently on...

The museum has one of the best scientific collections probably in the world! It’s a shame it seems so outdated, both in design and presentation, as well as in the building itself. It was always incredibly hot (which didn’t seem safe for the species kept there either), all the subtitles (with rare exceptions) were in italian, so either you take some expert with you or you don’t really understand anything else besides “oh, here are loads of shiny animals”.

On the good side, there were almost no people inside, so you can really have a pleasant visit!!!

The wax collection was COMPLETELY AMAZING!!

I'm just so sorry that we couldn’t spend any more time than the guided visit there! It was an incredible place to draw but we wouldn’t ever manage the opportunity! The visit was nice but, too quick for me. I would like more historical background and, although the guide was super nice, she spoke very quickly and with a very heavy accent so we couldn't understand it all.

The museum itself, the premises, entry, patium, don't seem very conserved, it’s a total shame.

It lacks a cafeteria,which is also a shame, because the ticket (which is very accessible) allows you to spend the whole day, any part of the day (during opening hours) there. You can go out and come back, but there’s no inside place to rest, which we missed because the whole exhibition was gigantic and we were very tired between exhibitions (we saw 3).

It was also hard to have any information online, the summer schedule is reduced. There’s an exhibition we can only book by phonecall but we had no info whatsoever online for that, so we gave up on it.

Just go prepared to spend a good amount of time there and suffer with the hot weather and no food/resting area...

The University Museum System originates and draws its identity from the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, of which it preserves the material and immaterial tradition, over four centuries long.

The most ancient nucleus of the Museum is represented by the "Giardino dei Semplici", commissioned in 1545 by Cosimo I dei Medici, who had the merit of establishing a botanical garden where medicinal plants were studied and cultivated, when Florence was at the center of the development of science humanistic and natural.

It is due to the love for science and to the passion for natural things of the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo the establishment in 1775 of the first naturalistic museum open to the public, the Imperial and Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History. In the Palazzo Torrigiani, now home to La Specola, the Medici collections of "natural things" were collected and expanded and nature was shown in its entirety: from mineralogy to astronomy, through botany, zoology and anthropology.

On the roots of this unitary vision of scientific knowledge, the heritage, enriched by centuries of studies and research, has merged into the Museum of Natural History, founded in 1984 with the aim of unifying the numerous collections held by the University of Florence.

Today there are three offices that make up the Museum: Palazzo Nonfinito , with the ethno-anthropological and osteological collections, the collections of the historical photographic archive; ' La Specola ', with the anatomical ceroplastic collections, the lito-mineralogical collections and the zoological collections; ' La Pira ', with the geo-paleontological, botanical collections, plants and collections of the...