MUM - Museo Mineralogico Luigi Celleri (San Piero in Campo)

The Museo Mineralogico Luigi Celleri (MUM) in San Piero in Campo presents Elba's pegmatite minerals, including elbaite, a tourmaline species named for the island.

Why it matters

For two centuries, granite cavities around San Piero in Campo have yielded tourmalines, beryls and quartz that attracted Italian and foreign scholars. The MUM opened in 2013 and was formally established in 2014. It presents these minerals in the landscape where they were found and forms part of the Sistema Museale dell'Arcipelago Toscano.

What to notice

The exhibition rooms occupy the first floor, twelve display cases arranged so that tourmaline leads the story. The star of the supergroup is elbaite, the species named for this island, shown here in dozens of specimens across its whole chromatic range — greens, yellows, pinks, reds, violets, blues and colourless crystals — associated with quartz, feldspars, garnets, beryls, lepidolite, petalite and pollucite. One case holds cut and faceted stones, proof of what lapidaries coax from these finds; a further case gathers historic Campo-area minerals once dispersed to museums worldwide.

Two cases change register, moving to the ore deposits of eastern Elba with pyrite, hematite and ilvaite — the latter a second mineral whose name honours the island, from its ancient name Ilva. Beyond the cases, a rock hall and a granite gallery explain the extraction techniques of the local quarries, and the museum's garden plants out Elban flora, completing the picture of a landscape that is geology made visible.

Context and history

The museum takes its name from Luigi Celleri, born in San Piero in 1828 and dead in 1900, the discoverer of many of the specimens that carried Elban minerals into the world's collections. Celleri worked with the scholar Raffaello Foresi and supplied collectors and scientists including Giorgio Roster and Bista Toscanelli; later he served Pilade Del Buono in building the mineral museum installed in the Demidoff Gallery at Napoleon's villa of San Martino. This history connects the museum to earlier collecting and research: the same Roster who photographed the island's landscapes from 1875 was one of the savants Celleri provisioned, and the scientific interest continued — the museum's research notes even return to the diary of Jean Charles Coindet, a scholar who arrived in San Piero in 1817. Elbaite itself entered the mineralogical record after its identification here in 1825, the island lending the new species its name — an unusual honour that the museum treats as its founding fact.