Collezione Anatomica Paolo Gorini

In a fifteenth-century cloister of Lodi's old hospital works one of Italy's most unusual museums: the anatomical collection of Paolo Gorini, the nineteenth-century Lodi scientist who learned to petrify organic tissue. His surviving human and animal preparations were made for teaching and study.

Why it matters

Gorini (1813–1881) is one of the strangest and most brilliant figures in Italian science: a mathematics graduate who worked as geologist and volcanologist, perfected a secret chemical process for petrifying organic matter, was called to preserve the body of Giuseppe Mazzini in 1872, and then turned to designing cremation furnaces whose model spread from the Riolo cemetery to many Italian cemeteries and as far as London and Paris. The Lodi collection holds a large share of the anatomical preparations he produced between 1834 and his death in 1881, objects created to fix human and animal anatomy against decay. It is at once a scientific collection, a monument to Risorgimento-era research and a museum of a single mind's obsession with preserving the body from what his contemporaries called the bite of the worms.

What to notice

The museum occupies rooms of the Ospedale Vecchio, adjoining the fifteenth-century Chiostro della Farmacia. The display follows Gorini's life and his lifelong tie to Lodi, where he arrived in 1834 as a physics teacher and worked until his death. The preparations — anatomical specimens petrified or preserved dry — were made for teaching and study. Research published in 2005 reconstructed Gorini's formulas, which combined mercuric compounds injected through the vascular system. Established as a museum in 1981 and reinstalled in 2008, the collection also hosts cultural and educational initiatives. Its specimens present Gorini's life and work through anatomical preparations.

Context and history

Born in Pavia in 1813 and orphaned young, Gorini graduated in mathematics at Pavia and reached Lodi in 1834, beginning the teaching and research career that made the city his laboratory. His petrification method, developed from the 1840s in the tradition of the earlier preparator Girolamo Segato, won him European fame; his involvement with the Risorgimento included the Five Days of Milan in 1848. The Mazzini commission of 1872 and the mummification of the novelist Giuseppe Rovani two years later fixed his public reputation, and his cremation furnace of 1877 at the Riolo cemetery made him a pioneer of the modern cremation movement. Honours eluded him — he never obtained a university chair and died in relative poverty in 1881. The collection assembled from his work found its first museum home in the former Chapter Hall of the old hospital in 1981, with the current layout, replacing the original by Antonio Allegri, dating from 2008.