MRSN - Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali

Piedmont's regional museum of natural sciences has gathered the territory's zoology, entomology, mineralogy and paleontology since 1978, working from the monumental former San Giovanni Battista hospital beside the Po. Its galleries put centuries of scientific collecting — from a seven-metre model of a prehistoric elephant to historic insect drawers — at the heart of the city's museum quarter.

Why it matters

Turin's museums excel in art and antiquity, but the MRSN is where the region's natural history lives. Created in 1978 by Regione Piemonte, the museum inherited and united historic collections from the University of Turin, including the zoological holdings of the old university museums of zoology and comparative anatomy — material of exceptional richness and rarity, much of it assembled in the nineteenth century when Turin was one of Europe's scientific capitals. The museum is also a working research institution, with sections of botany, entomology, mineralogy, petrography and geology, paleontology and zoology, a library of roughly 19,000 volumes, and digitization initiatives publishing collections on Piedmont's Mèmora platform. It is a reference archive of Alpine and Po-valley biodiversity.

What to notice

The collections include the historic Zoology Museum, the Arca delle Esplorazioni and the Sala delle Meraviglie. The zoological displays preserve the nineteenth-century mounting style and the historic specimens gathered when Turin's university collections were among Italy's largest. The paleontology section centres on the seven-metre model of a prehistoric elephant based on a find from Villafranca d'Asti — the emblematic witness to the Pliocene seas that once covered Piedmont. The mineralogy and geology holdings display rocks, drill cores and mining equipment that tell the story of the region's subsoil, and the entomological drawers hold historic insect collections partly inherited from the university. The specialist library serves as a working research resource.

Context and history

The museum occupies the block of the former Ospedale San Giovanni Battista, Turin's great hospital, begun at the end of the seventeenth century to designs associated with Amedeo di Castellamonte and extended by later architects — one of the most substantial baroque hospital complexes in northern Italy. When Regione Piemonte founded the MRSN in 1978, it placed the new institution in these buildings, giving the region a museum that consolidated scattered university and civic natural-science collections; the botany section formalised its own collections from 1983. Over the following decades the museum developed research programmes across its five scientific sections, temporary exhibitions and digitization of its holdings on the regional Mèmora platform. The museum is part of Turin's historic museum quarter.