Museo di Storia Naturale del Baldo e del Garda

Within the Casermetta of Malcesine's castle, nine rooms present Lake Garda and Monte Baldo through geology, ecology and natural history.

Why it matters

This museum is the handbook for the landscape outside the walls. Monte Baldo's botany and the lake's depths made the Malcesine area a study ground for naturalists since around 1500, and the municipality, working with the scientific staff of Verona's Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, rebuilt the castle's old natural history collection into a sequence of rooms designed around the visitor's senses. Inaugurated on 17 May 2008, the museum presents the natural history of the mountain and lake, from bedrock to summit fauna.

What to notice

The exhibition covers the formation of Lake Garda, its fish, and a reconstruction of reed-bed habitat near the Lazise pile-dwelling area. Other sections address vegetation from olive groves to mountain meadows, the scents of Baldo plants, local fauna, botanical exploration from about 1500, and animals found at elevations from 60 to 2,000 metres.

Context and history

A traditional natural history museum already occupied the castle in earlier decades, arranged in geology, paleontology, botany, zoology and prehistory sections from Veronese collections and local donations, with a Monte Baldo section added in the basement during the 1990s. In 2005 the municipality began working with the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale's scientific staff to redesign the museum as a natural history of the territory. The redesign took under two years of works and opened on 17 May 2008, retaining the Casermetta, the small barracks building inside the castle's walls, as its home.