Museo di Storia Naturale Giancarlo Ligabue (Fondaco dei Turchi)

This guide to the Museo di Storia Naturale in Venice's Fondaco dei Turchi describes the nightly lockdown Ottoman merchants lived under for over two centuries inside this canal-side palace, forbidden weapons or women past the gate as they traded silk, spices and the ash that fired Murano's furnaces. You'll hear why almost none of the original building survives beyond its arcaded facade, and meet Giancarlo Ligabue, a restless Venetian who funded his own fossil-hunting expeditions into the Sahara. It follows what he brought back into these very galleries.