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Luigi Rolando Museum of Human Anatomy

The Luigi Rolando Museum of Human Anatomy is the anatomical museum of the University of Turin, housed in the Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici at corso Massimo d'Azeglio 52; established in 1739 under Carlo Emanuele III, it preserves its nineteenth-century furnishings and layout, left unchanged throughout the twentieth century.[1][2]

History

Turin's anatomical school began in 1563 with the appointment of Angelo Visca of Savona; in 1739 Giovanni Battista Bianchi created the University's museum in the palazzo on via Po, and a plaster statue of a pregnant woman along with a few wax models survive from the eighteenth-century collection.[2][1] In 1830 Luigi Rolando put the collections on public display in the Palazzo dei Regi Musei, today home to the Egyptian Museum and the Academy of Sciences; in 1837 the museum moved to the San Giovanni Battista hospital, and in 1898 to its current location.[2][1]

Luigi Rolando (1773-1831), who graduated in Turin in 1793, had trained at the wax-modeling school in Florence; he gave his name to the "fissure of Rolando" and the "substantia gelatinosa of Rolando".[3] Carlo Giacomini (1840-1898), director of the Anatomical Institute from 1876, moved the museum to the new building; his skeleton is preserved in the museum in accordance with his will.[4]

The collections

The wax collection numbers over two hundred pieces: from 1815 the "Wax Workshop" set up at Rolando's initiative was staffed by the modelers Luigi and Giuseppe Cantù, and around 1830 waxworks from Florence and Naples were purchased.[5] In storage are more than two hundred military medical and surgical instruments dating from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, as well as a collection of paleoanthropological casts, begun in 1980, said to be the richest in Italy.[6]

The building and the restoration

The two "minarets" of the Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici are extraction chimneys for the dissection rooms; a 2001 agreement between the University and the Region gave rise to the Museo dell'Uomo project, bringing together the Museums of Anatomy, of Anthropology and Ethnography, and of "Cesare Lombroso", while the City's intervention brought the Museo della Frutta into the building as well.[7] The restoration, carried out between 2003 and 2006, involved 35 restorers and technicians working on stuccoes, granite columns, Venetian-style flooring and eleven oil portraits of scientists; the museum reopened in 2007.[8][1][9] The Museum of Anatomy is entered from corso Massimo d'Azeglio 52, while the Lombroso and Fruit museums are entered from via Pietro Giuria 15.[10]

Related articles: Museo della Frutta Francesco Garnier Valletti

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Sources

  1. MuseoTorino
  2. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 8 November 2023
  3. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 15 June 2026
  4. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 19 July 2022
  5. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 12 July 2022
  6. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 12 July 2022
  7. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 18 February 2020
  8. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 26 February 2020
  9. ANSA — 18 February 2017
  10. Museo di Anatomia umana, Università di Torino — 27 July 2026

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