Museum of Nature and Humankind

The Museum of Nature and Man of the University of Padua is divided into 38 rooms for a total of about 3,800 square meters, in addition to a room for temporary exhibitions of about 300 square meters, 700 square meters of technical and service environments and another 550 square meters of offices for staff.
Developed on three floors, it will exhibit 3,700 historical assets, of which 3,201 are restored in view of the exhibition, 25 tactile models in the zoology section and will have 187 showcases, 89 multimedia and exhibits, 80 room panels as well as 32 full-wall panels.

The museum was born from the fusion of the rich naturalistic collections that have been built for centuries by scholars and explorers of the University of Padua, for research and teaching purposes.
The new exhibition brings together in a single exhibition the pre-existing University Museums of Mineralogy, Geology and Paleontology, Anthropology and Zoology, integrating them into a coherent and exciting narrative, enriched by an intelligent graphic, textual and multimedia apparatus, to tell a planetary story from its beginnings, more than four billion years ago, up to the present day.

The new museum is located in Palazzo Cavalli, which has its heart in the historic building built in the second half of the sixteenth century in Padua, near the Porte Contarine, a hydraulic work that connected the inner canal of the city with the waterway to Venice.
The Palace has been progressively expanded, starting from the end of the nineteenth century, to meet the needs of the University of Padua, to constitute a complex that surrounds on all four sides a large internal courtyard.
The project of the Museum has made it possible to harmonize the various parts so as to favor the internal path.