Natural History Museum of Marseille

This guide to the Natural History Museum of Marseille begins with a mounted giraffe standing under a domed hall built for water, not wildlife, and uses her to ask how more than three hundred taxidermied animals ended up in a French port city. It traces the museum's founding cabinet of curiosities back to 1819, the centuries of Mediterranean trade that filled Marseille's harbor with exotic cargo, and the customs seizures that still happen at that same port today. It also follows the animals' move, in 1869, into a grand new palace shared with the city's fine-arts collection next door.