Foundation Museum Miniscalchi Erizzo

This guide to the Foundation Museum Miniscalchi Erizzo in Verona starts with a sixteenth-century apothecary, Francesco Calzolari, who filled his own pharmacy with shells, stuffed crocodiles, and dried plants to build one of Europe's earliest natural history collections. It follows the Veronese nobleman Ludovico Moscardo, who bought that cabinet and spent decades adding fossils, exotic animals, and Roman coins, then printed an illustrated catalogue of it in 1656. You'll see astrolabes, carved amber, and specimens Moscardo once called monstrous, arranged inside a partial reconstruction of his own cabinet. Look for the objects that make the case feel less like decoration and more like an early argument about how to know the world.