Museo di Palazzo Poggi

Palazzo Poggi still runs the University of Bologna from behind its Renaissance facade, the rector's offices are here, and the palace's name is stamped on the university's own address, Via Zamboni 33. But climb past the administrative floors and the building turns into something else entirely: a run of frescoed rooms giving way to wax cadavers, ship models, obstetric instruments, and a wunderkammer's worth of curiosities, all preserved inside the same walls where a sixteenth-century cardinal once kept his private chapel. The two lives, bureaucratic and cabinet-of-curiosities, occupy the same rooms without much distinction drawn between them.

The palace was built between 1549 and 1560 for Alessandro Poggi and his brother, the future Cardinal Giovanni Poggi. Who actually designed it is not settled: one attribution names Bartolomeo Triachini, apparently commissioned by Bishop Poggi shortly before his elevation to Cardinal; another names Pellegrino Tibaldi, the Bolognese painter the future Cardinal had met in Rome in 1547. The dispute has never fully resolved, and Palazzo Poggi's most famous name, Tibaldi, may in the end only be responsible for what is on the walls, not the walls themselves.

What is certain is the painting. Tibaldi returned to his native Bologna in 1555 and frescoed the palace and the Poggi family chapel, work later judged his masterpiece, most visible in the Room of Susana and the Room of the Zodiac. He worked alongside other Mannerist and early-Baroque hands: Prospero Fontana frescoed the Rooms of Moses and David and the small Camerino of the Sphinxes; Niccolo dell'Abbate painted the Room of Camilla, a run of Landscapes, a concert hall with the Labors of Hercules, and a room of wine-making putti; Fontana, Nosadella, and Ercole Procaccini the Elder together handled the Rooms of Grotteschi and Telamons.

Cardinal Poggi is also responsible for the palace's present shape: the large courtyard with its loggia, and the grand staircase climbing to the piano nobile. On the ground floor, the Aula Carducci commemorates Giosue Carducci, who lectured on Italian language and literature there for forty years. Nearby, the Hercules Room holds a statue of the demigod carved by Angelo Pio in 1730, muscular company for a building otherwise devoted to books and instruments.

In 1714 the palace became the seat of the Institute of Sciences, founded by the soldier-scholar Luigi Ferdinando Marsili and quickly recognized as one of Europe's model centers of Enlightenment learning, protected by the Bolognese pope Benedict XIV, born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini. The Institute built La Specola, its observatory tower, between 1712 and 1725; a library in 1744, designed by Giuseppe Antonio Torri and Carlo Francesco Dotti; and, in 1756, a monumental Great Hall on the palace's north side. A collection of images was begun in 1754, one more layer in an institution that spent the century accumulating the world in miniature.

Napoleon's occupation broke that accumulation apart. Scientific equipment was parceled out to separate faculties, anatomy, optics, chemistry, geography, nautical science, physics, astronomy, and the historic collections were scattered across other museums. Only the library stayed in Palazzo Poggi, and it became the nucleus of the university library that still operates there today. For two centuries, the Institute's holdings existed only as fragments, distributed and half-forgotten across a dozen faculties.

At the end of the twentieth century, the University of Bologna set out to undo that dispersal, tracking down and reassembling the old collections inside their historic home. The museum reopened to the public in autumn 2000, its rooms once again fitted out with the instruments and specimens the Institute had collected and used across the eighteenth century, a rare case of an Enlightenment cabinet of curiosities being deliberately, patiently put back together.

The collections that resulted are wide rather than tidy, and the museum route now moves through named sections rather than a single narrative: the Aula Carducci, the Museum of the Ninth Centenary, the Aldrovandi Museum, the Marsili Museum, the Museum of Ships and Antique Maps, the Obstetrics Museum named for G. A. Galli, and a room known simply as the Indian Museum. There is the natural-history cabinet of Ulisse Aldrovandi, a sixteenth-century naturalist, alongside Marsili's own holdings and the Institute's Diluvian Museum. The anatomy rooms are the ones people remember: wax models by Ercole Lelli, more by Giovanni Manzolini and by Anna Morandi Manzolini, one of the era's few celebrated female anatomists, and, most famous of all, the Venerina, a wax anatomical figure by Clemente Susini whose torso opens to reveal the organs beneath. An obstetrics school occupies its own rooms, a reminder that the wax bodies were teaching tools, not curiosities.

Elsewhere the museum turns to physics and chemistry, light and optics, electricity, a geography room, a room of military architecture, and a gallery of ships and antique sea charts. Between the anatomy wings and the geography room, the building reads less like a single museum than like a small university of its own, one subject behind each door. The Institute's original collecting habit went beyond instruments: it absorbed Ferdinando Cospi's wunderkammer and Aldrovandi's own sixteenth-century collection of paintings. The palace's picture gallery now holds more than six hundred portraits, and the original document of the Magna Charta Universitatum, the charter of academic freedoms signed by university rectors worldwide, is displayed in its own Sala della Magna Charta.

Palazzo Poggi shares its address with two more university museums, the Specola and the Museo Europeo degli Studenti, and the whole complex still functions as the university's administrative heart, rectorate, library, and picture gallery included. It is a working office building that never stopped being an Enlightenment-era museum, and walking its rooms means passing, within a few steps, from a rector's memo to a five-hundred-year-old wax heart.