- Art & Culture
Kosmos Natural History Museum
An antique museum with a science collection of the highest value, collated for educational purposes by Lazzaro Spallanzani in 1771.
The Kosmos Museum is named for the ancient Greek word meaning “order”, and the theme of the museum itinerary is a voyage undertaken to explore nature. When we travel, we discover new geographical terrain but we also cross into new scientific and mental territory.
The museum is housed in Pavia’s most elegant aristocratic residence, Palazzo Botta Adorno, which accomodated some illustrious figures including Napoleon and Victor Emanuel II of Savoia. The building you see now has been completely renovated and made interactive, with over 500 exhibits, multimedia games, videos, interactive activities for children and much more.
The museum was instituted by Maria Theresa of Austria in the second half of the seven hundreds and directed for almost thirty years by Lazzaro Spallanzani. It boasts one of the oldest zoological collections in the world. Some of the specimens are of great historical and scientific importance. They include a Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus), a hippoHippopotamus amphibius), a shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrhynchus) and a common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus).
The collections in the museum have grown over the centuries with contributions from Giuseppe Balsamo Crivelli, Torquato Taramelli, Leopoldo Maggi and Pietro Pavesi, to name only a few.
Opening hours
Museum opening times:
Monday closed
Tuesday 10.00 – 18.00
Wednesday 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday 10.00 – 18.00
Friday 10.00 – 18.00
Saturday 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday 10.00 – 18.00
Last admission at 5:30 pm
The museum is closed on: the 25th of December, Easter, the 1st of May and the 15th of August.
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