Palazzo Poggi

Museum of the University of Bologna, with eighteenth-century anatomical wax models

Address Via Zamboni 33

The Palazzo Poggi houses the museums of the University of Bologna. The university's old eighteenth-century cabinets of physics, military architecture, navigation, natural history, and anatomy have been kept largely intact, so a visit feels like a walk through Enlightenment science as it was practised — globes, terrestrial models, ship cutaways, mineral collections, and the famous anatomical waxes of Ercole Lelli and Anna Morandi Manzolini.

The Specola — the eighteenth-century astronomical observatory on top of the building — can be visited separately. The whole museum sits in the heart of the university quarter and is best combined with a stroll up Via Zamboni.

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A story
The wax anatomical models of Anna Morandi Manzolini, made in the 1750s, are uncannily lifelike. Morandi — a woman who took over her husband's chair in anatomy when he died — was famous across Europe for the precision of her dissections, eventually being invited to demonstrate them to Catherine the Great.

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