Museo Kosmos

Founded in 1771 from a scientist's teaching collection and a gift of minerals from Empress Maria Theresa, the Museo di Storia Naturale dell'Università di Pavia preserves natural history collections assembled by Lazzaro Spallanzani and his successors at Palazzo Botta Adorno.

Why it matters

The Museo di Storia Naturale dell'Università di Pavia was constituted in 1771, when Lazzaro Spallanzani took the newly created chair and built a teaching collection around minerals donated by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. After a century and a half in the university's Palazzo Centrale, the museum reopened as Kosmos in Palazzo Botta Adorno, a patrician residence that once hosted Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel II. Behind the display stands one of the oldest zoological collections in the world: roughly 9,800 vertebrates, including 4,300 taxidermied birds, Spallanzani-era specimens, an African elephant, a gorilla from the Congo, Andean condors captured in Chile in 1835, and a rare coelacanth fished in the Mozambique Channel in 1963.

What to notice

The museum's collections include the Nile crocodile and hippopotamus among its early holdings, birds of paradise donated by Giacomo Doria in 1876, and specimens from the explorations of Orazio Antinori, Odoardo Beccari and Luigi Maria D'Albertis. The broader holdings include fossils, rocks and minerals, wax anatomical models, Pietro Pavesi's spiders and Mario Pavan's insect collection.

Context and history

Spallanzani directed the museum for nearly thirty years and set its dual character — research instrument and public teaching collection. After his death in 1799, zoologists Giuseppe Balsamo Crivelli and Pietro Pavesi, comparative anatomist Leopoldo Maggi and geologist Torquato Taramelli drove its growth through purchases, exchanges and the absorption of personal collections, keeping the institution famous across Europe. The move to Palazzo Botta Adorno and the Kosmos name mark a later chapter in the museum's history, bringing the historic collection into a new setting. Within the University of Pavia's Sistema Museale di Ateneo, Kosmos keeps company with the University History Museum, the Botanical Garden and the Golgi Museum.