Civico Museo di Storia Naturale

Civico Museo di Storia Naturale review

Giovanni Ceruti's neo-classical building was put up in 1838 to house the collections left to the city by aristocrat Giuseppe de Cristoforis. It's a great rainy day museum: the displays cover botany, mineralogy, geology and palaeontology, with a lifesize triceratops the highlight of the latter. At times it feels like a museum of taxidermy, with diorama after diorama of jungle, prairie and arctic scenes populated with a stuffed cast. English explanations are scattered seemingly at random throughout the museum.