Museo di Storia Naturale

This guide to the Museo di Storia Naturale in Verona follows Francesco Calzolari, the sixteenth-century apothecary on Piazza delle Erbe who kept climbing Monte Baldo to collect plants, insects, fossils and stones instead of staying behind his counter. It traces how his shop filled with drawers of specimens, earning the nickname the Stanza delle Meraviglie, and how by 1554 he had already logged more than three hundred fifty plant species from that one mountain alone. His grandson later published an illustrated catalogue of the whole collection, complete with an engraving of a fake sea monster stitched from a dried ray.