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Guided Tour

Museo Circolante Casartelli

Located in the Sala Casartelli of the Carducci Institute in Via Cavallotti, the Museum houses a wealth of natural history specimens in display cases along the walls of the room and several hundred educational boxes with miniature examples of perfectly preserved insects, plant seeds, and other natural phenomena. The "stages of the embryonic development of the domestic cockerel", for example, shows each stage of the chick’s growth from the fertilised egg.

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There are numerous iconographic models of flowers, some of which are huge, up to a metre in height, such as the daisies, mallows and lilies, but there are also reproductions of fruit in wax such as apples and pears, raspberries, strawberries and grapes. Much of the Museum's exhibited material also relates to human anatomy and zoology, with life-size specimens of human musculature and the skeleton, parts of the nervous system, the ear, the circulatory system and heart, as well as stuffed animals and birds, and the skeletons of fish and other vertebrates. All the small animal samples under formalin are perfectly preserved, as are the internal organs of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. There are also many very large-scale reproductions of insects, spiders, molluscs and worms.

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appears as a fairy tale. In September 1927 the Museum was the venue for the international conference of physicists on the occasion of the “Anno Voltiano”, dedicated to the scientist Alessandro Volta. Twelve Nobel Prize winners attended the meeting, including Guglielmo Marconi and Hermann Bohr. To commemorate the special event, their names were inscribed in the medallions on the ceiling along with those of all the conference participants. The museum room has since been called the 'Nobel Hall'.