Description
La Specola is Florence's zoology museum, on Via Romana, in Palazzo Torrigiani, a few steps from Palazzo Pitti. It is the heir of the oldest public science museum in Europe, born here in 1775, and it holds taxidermied animals, wax models and minerals.
The name comes from the observatory, the “specola”, that Grand Duke Peter Leopold had built in the little tower. But the most famous collection has nothing to do with the stars: it is the human bodies in wax, unique for its age and its size.
There are about 1,400 anatomical models, made from 1771 to teach anatomy in three dimensions, without always resorting to cadavers. The full-length figures are the most striking, like the Flayed Man, laid out with muscles and blood vessels in view, down to capillaries made with wax slid along silk threads.
More macabre are the plague waxes of Gaetano Zumbo, commissioned by Cosimo III between 1691 and 1694: small scenes of decomposing bodies, damaged by the flood and then almost all restored with patient work.
The zoological part is made of rooms for groups of animals, from mollusks to insects, from fish to birds. Standouts are the white rhinoceros, the giant Galápagos tortoises, a crocodile mummified in ancient Egypt and the Sala delle Paradisee (Hall of the Birds of Paradise) with the most flamboyant birds.
In the Salone degli Scheletri there are skeletons of elephants, and that of a humpback whale, the largest in an Italian museum. A neoclassical room, the Tribuna di Galileo, has the scientist's statue and paintings dedicated to knowledge.
One curiosity is the Boboli hippopotamus. It arrived in Florence in the 18th century as an exotic gift for the grand duke and apparently lived for a few years in the Boboli Garden. Then it passed to the taxidermists, who had never seen a living hippopotamus: they put it back together like a plantigrade.
Among the display cases there is also the plaster model of a giant Japanese salamander, which lived in the museum from 1875 to 1918.
The name comes from the observatory, the “specola”, that Grand Duke Peter Leopold had built in the little tower. But the most famous collection has nothing to do with the stars: it is the human bodies in wax, unique for its age and its size.
There are about 1,400 anatomical models, made from 1771 to teach anatomy in three dimensions, without always resorting to cadavers. The full-length figures are the most striking, like the Flayed Man, laid out with muscles and blood vessels in view, down to capillaries made with wax slid along silk threads.
More macabre are the plague waxes of Gaetano Zumbo, commissioned by Cosimo III between 1691 and 1694: small scenes of decomposing bodies, damaged by the flood and then almost all restored with patient work.
The zoological part is made of rooms for groups of animals, from mollusks to insects, from fish to birds. Standouts are the white rhinoceros, the giant Galápagos tortoises, a crocodile mummified in ancient Egypt and the Sala delle Paradisee (Hall of the Birds of Paradise) with the most flamboyant birds.
In the Salone degli Scheletri there are skeletons of elephants, and that of a humpback whale, the largest in an Italian museum. A neoclassical room, the Tribuna di Galileo, has the scientist's statue and paintings dedicated to knowledge.
One curiosity is the Boboli hippopotamus. It arrived in Florence in the 18th century as an exotic gift for the grand duke and apparently lived for a few years in the Boboli Garden. Then it passed to the taxidermists, who had never seen a living hippopotamus: they put it back together like a plantigrade.
Among the display cases there is also the plaster model of a giant Japanese salamander, which lived in the museum from 1875 to 1918.