Other collections

In the Botanical Museum there are seven exhibition rooms on two floors.

First room – In addition to the portrait of the founder of the Botanical Garden Luca Ghini, you can admire the carved old walnut door, once placed in Via Santa Maria at the entrance of the Giardino dei Semplici

Second room – It houses a small reconstruction of the 16th century Wunderkammer, that was created in the building that today houses the Museum. A reconstruction of a Wunderkammer is also present at the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa at the Pisa Charterhouse which preserves some original finds from the first collection exposed in the ancient “Gallery” established inside this building in 1591.

Third room – It houses the historical collection of portraits of botanists, naturalists and directors of the Botanic garden. In this room is also exhibited a copy of the book Catalogus Plantarum Horti Pisani by Michelangelo Tilli published in 1723.

Fourth room – Dedicated entirely to Gaetano Savi, prefect of the Garden and director of the Botanical Museum at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Fifth room – On display are splendid nineteenth-century wax or paper-mache models, almost all commissioned by Pietro Savi in support of his teaching activity. Among them, of particular importance are the mushrooms, made by the ceroplastic school of Luigi Calamai. Worthy of particular importance is also the original model depicting the fertilization of the pumpkin, that was used by Giovanni Battista Amici to illustrate his discoveries during the first meeting of Italian scientists held in Pisa in 1839. All the models were restored in 2016 by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, thanks to the financial contribution of the Fondazione Pisa.

Sixth room – Dedicated to Teodoro Caruel and Giovanni Arcangeli. Here, among the various exhibits, there are also some samples and preparations of fiber plants, purchased at the Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906.

Seventh room – there are some samples from the Herbarium, some didactic plates of the 19th century and others produced between the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, as well as a selection of paleobotanical finds preserved in the Museum.

Miscellanies

Miscellany Barsali – Egidio Barsali (1876-1945) was born in Pisa and in this city he graduated in Natural Sciences in 1901. Since then, he began his collaboration with the botanists of the University of Pisa as an assistant to the chair of Botany. From 1922 he moved to Umbria, where he was professor of Botany in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Urbino. He was Dean of that faculty from 1931 to 1945. He donated to his personal herbarium to the Pisa Botanic Museum in 1936. The samples of his Herbarium were intercalated in the collections of the Herbarium Horti Botanici Pisani (PI). After his death, his collections of books and documents were introduced in the Archive of the Museum. The latter materials were ordered in a miscellany.

LEAFLET

Botanic Museum ENG