MUSEO CIVICO DI STORIA NATURALE
Ferrara - Italy

The ground floor
The exhibit starts at the ground floor with a room devoted to the story of the ancient and new collections of the Museum: how the minerals, the fossils and the embalmed animals arrived to the Museum's showcases in the past and how they reach them nowadays.

The ground floor also hosts a didactic room for the labs with the school students and a space for temporary exhibitions and conferences.

Then, at the first floor, the exhibition is divided into two parts, "Ambiente Terra" and a "classical" museum show.

Ambiente Terra
The exhibit has an ecological approach. It shows the techniques used to describe the landscape and to study the animal populations and communities and the geological and biological evolution of our planet.
A large semicircular showcase depicts the biodiversity in the province of Ferrara, from the urban center up to the coast of the Adriatic sea, through the agricultural landscape, the freshwater wetlands and the saltmarshes created in the millenia by the development of the Po River delta.
Moreover, the formation of fossils and the perpetual changes that involve our planet are explained.
Some examples of relevant geological phenomena in the Ferrara province are explained: the geotermic power of the underground water and its use to heat many buildings of the city, the risk of earthquakes and vulcanoes in our country.

The "classical" museum
Here we have many showcases that exhibit arthropods, expecially insects and crustaceans, other invertebrates such as molluscs and sea-stars, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, as a tool to communicate the enormous diversity of life on the Earth.
Many items come from some exotic countries (Africa, South America, New Zealand...) and largely are a heritage of the past centuries, when some travellers born in Ferrara went in countries far away. They brought in Ferrara many pieces, wishing to pay homage to their motherland and to give people not able to travel the chance to have a glance at the life outside the borders of their country.
Many interesting etnological and geological findings are also shown, such as an impressive tsantsa (a small mummified human head) from the South America and many fossils coming from the famous extractive site of Bolca, in Veneto.

Other opportunities for visiting our Museum at the url Cosa c'è da vedere: info visita.