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Entering the Natural History Museum is a real Jurassik Park adventure, especially for your children. Located in the historic center of Siena, in a Camaldolese monastery of the twelfth century, the museum is managed by the Academy of Fisiocritici (from the greek "judges of nature"), founded in 1691 to promote wildlife studies and interpreting them in the light of the new ideas of the Enlightenment.

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Academics gathered periodically performed experiments, carried out astronomical observations. One of the main tasks was to spread the knowledge of science. The Library (with more than 6,000 volumes) and the Museum of Natural History, with its exhibits, provided evidences and materials for the scientific world and the population. Some of them are really impressive, such as the cloister of the monastery, with the skeleton of a whale. The museum has three sections: the Zoological Museum, the Museum of Paleontology and the Geological museum.

A last underground section, recently opened to the public, is very striking, because the exhibition spaces have been created in ancient rooms carved into the rock and also in the old cistern used to collect rainwater: the ceiling you see the well-century that opens in the cloister above. The Museum has also an anatomical section, consisting of human anatomy petrified by Francesco Spirit at the beginning of the twentieth century, according to a technique designed by himself, and the collection of body parts dried up by the great scientist Paolo Mascagni in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

The Zoological Museum

The zoology museum consists of hundreds of stuffed animals and multicolored butterflies, collected between the mid 1800s and early 1900s: the course material has been recently reorganized according to modern classification, but has been kept intact the appearance of the nineteenth-century collection, where each animal species is represented by more pieces exhibited in a small space. In the zoological section it was realized a tactile, for both children to visually impaired adults.

The Museum of Paleontology and The Geological museum

The museum of paleontology is a collection of great interest, where you can see fossils of all kinds, from the huge mammoth molars to microfossils preserved in original and characteristic containers eighteenth century, of course coming from Tuscany and Siena. The Museum of geology and mineralogy consists of interesting collections: Bular lands of Mount Amiata, used in the '700 and' 800 as natural dyes with the name "Sienna", with a great variety of yellows, reds and browns.

Info

Accademia dei Fisiocritici, Piazzetta S.Gigli 3, Siena

Opening hours Every day excepts Thursday, Saturday and feast days. 9-13. 15-18

Free entrance