Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa

This guide to the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa centers on Sebastiano Richiardi, who became its director in eighteen seventy-one and spent over three decades chasing a goal no other European collection had matched: a skeleton of every known kind of whale and dolphin. It traces how he inherited a modest cabinet of about eight whale skeletons inside a former Carthusian monastery and kept writing, negotiating and buying to expand it, choosing to fill the monks' old covered walking gallery, built for quiet solitary pacing, with what he collected. Walk the gallery slowly, the way the monks once did, and picture it before Richiardi's bones arrived.