University Museums - SMA

The University Museums, thanks to their priceless heritage, are more like a large encyclopaedia available for everyone to consult. The “Sistema Museale di Ateneo -SMA” (University’s Museum System), consisting of 14 different museums and developed along the most lively and animated streets of the University District, is a window into science history, displayed and narrated museum after museum as if you were leafing through a book. 

The majority of such museums is concentrated along the most beloved university street, Via Zamboni, starting from the Museums of Palazzo Poggi, with their ancient Library and their valuable collections of Natural History, Anatomy, Midwifery, Physics, Chemistry, Military Architecture, Geography, Nautical Science and Eastern Art. Moving on in this vein, the Geology Collections “Giovanni Cappellini” are going to astound you with an amazing model of a Diplodocus, a dinosaur hailing from the Jurassic Period. The nearby Zoology Collection, established in 1860, comes with extraordinarily faithful dioramas reproducing Italy’s main national parks. The students’ social role within the university institutions is then further approached and analysed inside the Meus, the European Museum of Students (Museo Europeo degli Studenti). Piazza di Porta San Donato hosts the Mineralogy Collection “Museo Luigi Bombicci”, where, amongst others, you can admire 142 stone meteorites. 

Other interesting museums await to be discovered in via Francesco Selmi, not far from via Zamboni, more specifically the Collection of Comparative Anatomy, established in 1814, the Collection of Anthropology, dating back to 1908, and the Collection of Chemistry “Giacomo Ciamician”, which retains several machineries and devices used both as didactic tools for students and as proper equipment for scientific researchers. 

The city’s botanical garden, established in 1568 on the initiative of the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, is one of the biggest of its kind in Italy and collects a wide range of rare species of flowers and plants. Feel inspired by the human body’s intriguing secrets displayed at the Collection of Anatomical Waxes and by the various models contained therein, some of them made of real bones, which were once used by the most brilliant students of the Medical Faculty for their investigations on human pathologies. Do not forget about the Physics Collection with the incredible experimental and didactic tools once employed by the physicists Augusto Righi and Quirino Majorana.  

To conclude your journey out of town, do consider visiting the Collection of Pathological Anatomy and Veterinary Teratology and the Anatomical Collection of Domestic Animals, both to be found in Ozzano dell’Emilia inside the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.