The Museum of thrills

Housed in the Fontego dei Turchi on the Grand Canal, the Museum of Natural History welcomes the entering visitor with its small but evocative garden, open to everyone.

The Museum ensures the preservation and continuous increase of its scientific collections.

The scientific staff carries out research on a regular basis both in the natural environment and the lab, especially in the fields of biology and ecology of the Venice lagoon and the Veneto region.

The scientific library of the Museum contains a wealth of ancient and modern books, national and international journals, documents and correspondence of famous naturalists from the Venetian territory.

The Museum carries out science education activities addressed to both school classes and the general public.

The Museum’s first room, gateway to the palaeontology section with a striking theatrical effect, is dedicated to the expedition organized in the 1973 by Giancarlo Ligabue to the Ténéré desert.

Works of the devil or creations of gods? Tricks of nature or the remains of dragons and giants? Fossils have always aroused curiosity and alarm in man, nourishing myths and legends.

The paleontological section continues with the story of the evolution of life on the planet, unfolding significant examples of organisms and environments from the various geological periods.

Many fossil traces, left by organisms along the history of life, accompany the visitor on this amazing journey.

GIOVANNI MIANI (1810-1872). Venetian by adoption, musicologist, poet, patriot, but illegitimate son and finally exile, he search an opportunity for personal redemption in the adventurous nineteenth-century exploration of Africa.

GIUSEPPE DE REALI (1877-1937). The last descendant of a Venetian landowners family and passionate of big game, he carried out twelve hunting expeditions mainly in the northern and equatorial Africa.

GIANCARLO LIGABUE (1931-2015). Passionate scholar of archaeology and palaeontology, he organized expeditions to the five continents, often with exceptional results, earning international recognition.

The room is inspired by the Wunderkammern, the sixteenth-century ‘chambers of wonders’, where examples of the wonders and oddities of nature were displayed.

The room, inspired to a typical nineteenth-century exhibit, displays especially the main collections of distinguished Venetian naturalists that make up the historical core of the Museum of Natural History.

WITHOUT MOVING. Not many animals are able to span their entire life cycle, or most of it, standing more or less still. Nevertheless, this specialization exists across several systematic groups.

WALKING, RUNNING, JUMPING... The ability to move is one of the most obvious characteristics of animals. On land, movement generally takes places in two dimensions, as gravitation keeps the body in contact with the ground.

MOVING IN THE WATER. Organisms that travel in water can freely move in the three dimensions, in a state of almost zero gravity.

MOVING IN THE AIR. Indeed, most animal species are able to fly, given that more than half of all living creatures are insects.

FEEDING ON LIGHT. The leaf-shaped room offers an understanding of the complex mechanisms of photosynthesis, which starts from the most abundant and easily found source of energy: the sun.

The BioGlobe. This small, spherical aquarium renders, at a simplified and smaller scale, some of the processes occurring on Earth since billions of years.