Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali (Regional Museum of Natural Science)

The Regional Museum of Natural Science is placed in via Giolitti, on the side formerly seat of the San Giovanni Battista Hospital in the city centre.

It was born at the end of the 17th century by Amedeo di Castellamonte and completed by famous architects; the Ospedale Maggiore, that was its former name, was since the beginning a model institution of the hospital science of the period.

Regional Museum of Natural Science

In 1978 the Piedmont Region instituted with a law (L.R. 37/78) the Regional Museum of Natural Science and with the stipulation of the usage commodity of a part of the building of the San Giovanni Battista Hospital, and it set the prestigious seat.

In 1980 a convention was drawn up, in force at present, between the Piedmont Region and the Universities of Studies of Turin, for the delivery for usage to the Regional Museum of Natural Science of the natural collections of the University Museums, therefore, the museum began the placing and the cataloguing of the university?s collections, with conservative and exhibition aims.

In 1981 began the exhibition activity of the Regional Museum of Natural Science with the opening of the first exhibitions: "Il Celacanto", "La Collezione Spinola", "I cristalli di quarzo", "Lepidoptera" ? dedicated to the collections of great scientific value purchased by the Piedmont Region.

In 1989 the Piedmont Region purchased the Rea Botanic Garden, placed in Val Sangone, a few km from Turin, for the activities of experimentation, research, didactic and divulgation centred in the collection of living plants and on exhibition moments of particularly noteworthy issues of botanic.

The museum is nowadays articulated, for the scientific part, in the sections of Botanic, Entomology, Mineralogy-Geology-Petrography, Palaeontology and Zoology; it has got about 1,000 square metres of exhibition area and it also has a specialized library which own 12,000 volumes and 1,250 periodicals.

It unwinds an intensive publishing activity of scientific matter which is concreted in the publishing of the multilingual semester bulletin, of the specialized monographic collections, of the catalogues of the museum's collections and of other institutions, of the congresses' minutes and of the guides to temporary exhibitions which illustrate the expositive activity of the museum.

Finally, there are several activities made by the didactic centre of the museum, which are articulated in a number of services including the realization of didactic laboratories, the institution of naturalistic tours, the scheduling of guided tours and of training courses for teachers and the production of teaching aids.