La Specola — Museo di Storia Naturale

La Specola occupies Palazzo Torrigiani between the Arno and the Boboli Gardens. Opened in 1775 as the Imperiale e Reale Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale, it joined collections of natural history with an important workshop of anatomical wax models. Zoological displays, wax sculpture and the observatory tower preserve the museum’s Enlightenment origins.

Why it matters

Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo founded the museum on 21 February 1775 as a public institution devoted to natural history and physics. The palace had been acquired in 1771 and adapted by architect Gaspare Maria Paoletti as a home for the collections. La Specola’s original ambition was to bring natural phenomena together in one institution, from minerals and fossils to botany, zoology and astronomy.

What to notice

The anatomical wax collection grew from a workshop founded by Felice Fontana in 1771. The museum holds about 1,400 anatomical pieces in 513 urns, alongside comparative anatomy and more than 400 botanical wax models. The models were made from coloured wax over plaster casts. Five seventeenth-century wax groups by Gaetano Zumbo form another highlight. Emperor Joseph II commissioned a 1,200-piece copy of the wax collection for Vienna’s Josephinum; a separate consignment of waxes sent to Montpellier during the Napoleonic period remained there. The zoological displays include taxidermy and skeletons. The Tribuna di Galileo honours the scientist, while the observatory tower, or torrino, became operational in 1807.

Context and history

The museum brought together collections that had previously been kept in places such as the Uffizi. In 1763, naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti compiled a catalogue of the grand-ducal specimens. Felice Fontana became the museum’s first director. In 1807, the collections were attached to a new science school, ending the unified display; they were later divided among separate institutes. La Specola is now part of the University of Florence’s Museum of Natural History, whose collections number more than eight million specimens and trace their institutional history to the Giardino dei Semplici, founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1545.