Aboca Museum - Museo delle Erbe

Sansepolcro made its name with paint and mathematics; it now adds plants. The Aboca Museum, the corporate museum of the herb-based health company Aboca, traces the thousand-year relationship between people and medicinal plants through illustrated herbals, bronze mortars, apothecary ceramics and scent-filled rooms inside a Renaissance palace on the town's main street.

Why it matters

Founded in 2002, the museum presents the scientific culture behind Aboca's work with herbal health products. The official mission page describes a historical-scientific itinerary that recovers and exalts the therapeutic power of herbs, drawing on Aboca's collection of apothecary art. Aboca's museum programme also addresses scientific innovation, human care, environmental sustainability and humanity's relationship with the living world. The museum occupies Palazzo Bourbon del Monte, a Renaissance palace on Sansepolcro's historic main street.

What to notice

The collections include erbari, illustrated herbals that transmitted botanical knowledge, alongside pharmaceutical-botany books, bronze and stone mortars, maiolica apothecary jars and glassware. The Bibliotheca Antiqua contains roughly three thousand books on the medicinal use of plants, spanning from the first age of printing to the early twentieth century. The museum's contemporary exhibits explore how herbal traditions relate to modern phytotherapy.

Context and history

Aboca was born in Sansepolcro as a company working on plant-based health products, and the museum is its institutional face — the official site calls it "the museum of the Aboca company". The 2002 opening of Erbe e Salute nei secoli converted the firm's collecting into a public itinerary, and two decades of acquisitions shaped the present display inside Palazzo Bourbon del Monte, a noble residence on the medieval main street. The choice of subject is no accident for this town: the Valtiberina's mountain slopes have fed herbal practice for centuries, and the museum's antiquarian library links that local practice to European botanical science, from early printed herbals to the analytical plant studies of the twentieth century.