Museo Civico Craveri di Storia Naturale

Born from a nineteenth-century family obsession with nature, the Museo Civico Craveri is a natural history museum in the province of Cuneo. Across three floors of halls — fossils, hummingbirds, African trophies, herbaria — it tells the story of the Craveri family's explorations and of the ecosystems around Bra itself.

Why it matters

The Craveri is a natural history museum in the province of Cuneo, among Piedmont's older such institutions. It grew from the private collection begun in the first half of the nineteenth century by Angelo Craveri, a Bra lawyer and statesman, and expanded spectacularly by his sons Federico and Ettore — Federico an explorer who sailed to Baja California and even discovered and named a new island there. The museum is at once a family biography, a cabinet of global zoology and a document of the local environment.

What to notice

The three floors are organised by collection area. On the ground floor, the Sala Craveri introduces the family, followed by the geology hall and the hall of local palaeontology, which includes a fossil of a sirenian — a sea cow related to today's dugong — that swam the Mediterranean roughly three million years ago. The first floor is systematic zoology: marine invertebrates, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles and an ornithology section where a single display case holds more than sixty species of hummingbirds, one of the collection's signature sights. The second floor includes historic bird collections, a room on Bra's habitats and the Teneré prehistory room. Along the stairways, African ungulate trophies record the family's collecting era; a greenhouse of succulent plants and the herbaria extend the collections to botany.

Context and history

Angelo Craveri, undersecretary of state under King Carlo Felice, returned to Bra from Turin in 1836 and organised his natural-history collection in a house on the street that now carries the family name. His sons Federico and Ettore carried the work far beyond Italy — Federico's collecting voyages produced specimens and stories still central to the museum's identity, summed up in his motto that nature shows herself to those who know how to question her. When Federico died in 1890 the family heirs donated the museum and all its collections to the town of Bra, and the Craveri house has been a civic institution ever since. Today it is organised into four sections — historic, earth sciences and pre-history, zoology, and ecology and botany — and forms part of the Musei di Bra network.