Museo di Scienze Naturali dell'Alto Adige

The South Tyrol Museum of Natural History explores the province’s geology, habitats and wildlife, including the formation of the Dolomites and post-glacial recolonisation.

Why it matters

The Naturmuseum Südtirol, as the South Tyrol Museum of Natural History is known in German, belongs to the Autonomous Province of Bolzano and makes the region's own geology and habitats its subject, from the uplift of the Dolomites to the return of plants, animals and people after the last ice age. The exhibition connects these subjects across the province’s valleys and mountain landscapes. The museum is also a working scientific institution, maintaining collections, publishing monographs on South Tyrol's flora and fauna and running a library service together with the university library, so the galleries sit on top of active research rather than replacing it.

What to notice

The permanent exhibition is organised in three movements. The first covers the geological development of four characteristic South Tyrolean landscapes. The second area turns to the habitats of South Tyrol and to recolonisation after the ice: plants and animals returned, and so did humans, and the displays trace what that succession left behind in the valleys and on the slopes. The third area is a coral reef aquarium of about 9,000 litres, accompanied by a jellyfish tank. It evokes the shallow tropical sea that covered the area of today’s Dolomites during the Triassic, about 230–220 million years ago. Other displays include a living ant colony, terrarium animals, and interactive experiment stations.

Context and history

The museum occupies a Gothic building of the sixteenth century on Via Bottai, at the north-eastern edge of the old town near the arcades. In the building's earlier life it served as the point where toll and land dues were collected for the Habsburg ruler Maximilian I, a reminder that Bolzano's compact centre has always recycled its commercial architecture. The museum grew into the province's main institution for collecting and documenting natural-history material, and it now operates within the provincial state museums organisation alongside the other large state-funded collections of the region. Its publishing programme, with monographs on the flora and fauna of South Tyrol, and its cooperation with the free university of Bozen-Bolzano's library, mark it out as a research museum rather than a display only.