Museo civico di storia naturale (Verona)

The civic natural history museum is in the 16th century Palazzo Pompei, a masterpiece by Sanmicheli. The building was given to the town in 1854 by Count Alessandro Pompei for it to become an exhibition site for scientific and ethnographic collections, and for renaissance artifacts and art collections. While there was a time when the natural collections were few in comparison to the rest, the collection grew quickly with the passage of time. There were problems of space and it was only in 1936 that the art collections were moved to other buildings. Palazzo Pompei became an exhibition space exclusively for natural science. At present, there are 19 rooms in which you can see more than 2,000,000 examples of the world's animals, plants, geology, paleontology and prehistory. The fossilized fish from Bolca are a major attraction. They are contained in a weir which is 45,000,000 years old.