The museum dates from 1932. It was born with a nineteenth-century mind, the kind with crowded cases and handwritten labels. Today it is something else. It is a scientific institution that works in a network with the university and with the other European research centers. The change shows in the new halls. It shows even more in the laboratories, which the same agreement with Sapienza has equipped with new instruments — a scanning electron microscope among them — to digitize the collections and build a dedicated database. The collections amount to about four million specimens. For decades they stayed in storage. Now they are starting to come out, in two ways.

The first way is the Sala della Biodiversità. It is conceived as a contemporary wunderkammer, a chamber of wonders. Five large display cases. Specimens never shown before. Sea shells from the malacological collection. Birds from the ornithological. Fish, amphibians, and reptiles from the herpetological. Mammals from the theriological. A whole wall given over to insects, the entomological. Didactic panels alongside. The hall was built around a precise idea: to make people love nature. It does not begin with what man destroys every day. It begins with beauty. With the variety of shapes, colors, adaptations. He who loves a thing does not want to destroy it. Protection comes after, comes on its own, comes because one has learned to look.

The second way is the Bioverso, set up in another wing of the museum. It is a multimedia, interactive hall. Immersive projections, virtual landscapes, soundscapes. The visitor no longer looks at the case: he steps inside it. He explores ecosystems, follows the history of the collections, walks through environments that cases cannot show. The coral reef, the forests, the extreme habitats. It is a language that works on emotion and knowledge together.
At the opening, before the public, Massimiliano Smeriglio spoke first, Assessore alla Cultura e al Coordinamento delle iniziative riconducibili alla Giornata della Memoria di Roma Capitale. Smeriglio made a point of saying that the Museo di Zoologia is, in fact, the city's science museum today, until the future museo della scienza arrives, and that scientific culture is part of Rome's identity. He called the two halls a concrete commitment to strong innovation, and he thanked the partners: Sapienza, the Sovrintendenza, the National Biodiversity Future Centre.

For the Sovrintendenza, Ilaria Miarelli Mariani spoke, director of the Direzione Musei Civici. For Sapienza, Marco Oliverio was there, full professor of Zoology at the Dipartimento di Biologia e Biotecnologie "Charles Darwin", a malacologist who has worked for years on the museum's historical collections. He explained the spirit of the operation: to translate the nineteenth-century idea of the chamber of wonders into a modern version, with the two halls answering each other — one of specimens, one of sensory instruments — and beside them a digital laboratory for the collections. Also present was Fabrizio Rufo, professor of Bioethics at Sapienza and Assessore alla Cultura e Università del II Municipio di Roma.
The hall was full of scientific figures — malacologists, entomologists, zoologists of various backgrounds — and Professor Raffaele Sardella, full professor of Paleontology at Sapienza and director of the MUST, the Museo Universitario di Scienze della Terra. Sardella chaired the Istituto Italiano di Paleontologia Umana from 2009 to 2013, an institute which, it is worth remembering, kept its Roman seat for years right here, at the Museo di Zoologia, before its final move to Anagni.
The museum is housed in the 1910 building that was once the restaurant of the Giardino Zoologico. For nearly a century it has been a point of reference for natural-history teaching and public outreach. The exhibition path takes up sexual reproduction as the engine of biodiversity, adaptations to extreme environments, taxonomic order, skeletal anatomy, the urgency of conservation. On the lower floor is the Sala della Balena, with the sixteen-meter skeleton of a fin whale. The animal species known on the planet today number about 1.8 million. To preserve them, Smeriglio said, means to ensure the survival of man.

The two halls are open to the public from today.

*Board Member, SRSN (Roman Society of Natural Science)
Past Editor-in-Chief Italian Journal of Dermosurgery