About
The first great curiosity cabinet was this zoological museum.
Ferrets lay in taxonomic chaos next to mottled gray dolphins at the Bologna Zoological Museum. The sleek design of the lobby gives way to rows and rows of cabinets filled with strangely shaped animals. But the enjoyably shabby museum disguises a noble past. It traces its roots all the way back to the very first curiosity cabinet, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s interests ranged widely from botany to zoology to geology, a word he is thought to have coined. At the young age of 31, after serving out a sentence for heresy, Aldrovandi began collecting anything of natural interest he could get his hands on. Aldrovani also had a taste for the bizarre and wrote a compendium, the Monstrorium Historia, of all known human and animal monstrosities of which he was constantly seeking for collection.
