Museo di Palazzo Poggi

About this audio guide

This guide to the Museo di Palazzo Poggi in Bologna opens with a question a midwife's hands alone had to answer in the dark: how a baby was lying, with a life on the line. It follows the physician Giovan Antonio Galli's response in the seventeen forties, a glass sphere sized to a full-term belly with a cloth doll inside, on which midwives trained blindfolded, and the wax models made alongside it by the sculptors Giovanni Manzolini and his wife Anna Morandi. Look at the cases around you, each rehearsing a birth someone in this city actually faced.