Small journey through images of an extraordinary place
There is no better way to inaugurate the blog section. We visited the Dadom museum in Naples at the beginning of the summer and the experience was decidedly exciting. We had high expectations and they were all exceeded by the incredible collection that the museum houses inside.If you pass through Naples, and you are passionate about the sector, you cannot miss this stop.
The museum was born in the footsteps of Anton Dohrn, a German zoologist of the late 19th century' who decided to build his zoological research station in Naples, this choice was due to the biological richness of the Gulf of Naples< /a> and also to the possibility of creating a research institute of international importance in a large university city.This station was designed as a place where scientists could stop, collect materials, make observations and conduct experiments.
The visit unfolds through educational paths and celebrates the close relationship between Anton Dohrn< /strong> and Charles Darwin. The intense correspondence between the two testifies to Darwin's favor for the initiative of Dohrn, who, in love with the wonders of marine life in the Gulf, decided to open the museum to show the Neapolitans the richness of their territories.“I fully believe that you have thus done a great service to science”
Charles Darwin's response to Anton Dohrn when he informed him of his intention to found the Zoological Station in Naples (1872)Dohrn was an avant-garde attentive to the concept of biodiversity, and the Museum is conceived as a "long speech" that illustrates the main concepts that allow us to understand evolution, from the origin of life today.
But the D'Adom Museum is not just a natural history museum. It is also a real Wunderkammer, a chamber of wonders that catapulted us into a world of curiosities and species never seen before. The collection is vast and also includes unusual objects and scientific instruments; every corner of the museum hides an unexpected surprise, which made us feel like real explorers in an unknown world. The gigantic display case in the first image is the flagship of the DaDom, the majestic Glass cage, 6 meters high, which collects around 10,000 historical artefacts from the Station Zoological, many of which were prepared in Dohrn's time by the collaborator Salvatore Lo Bianco.
Growing up in the fishermen's neighborhood of Mergellina, Salvatore Lo Bianco by lucky chance found himself living in the same building where Dorhn lived and where his father served as a doorman.So it was that in 1874, Lo Bianco was welcomed by Dohrn among the laboratory staff of the newly founded zoological station, with the task of managing the conservation department and the public aquarium. Without any technical training he worked on the samples and taxidermized them, he did it so well that these samples, encouraged by Dohrn - a true entrepreneur of science - were also sold around the world to finance the Station's research Zoological.Today the Glass Cage of the DaDoM hosts various samples that are at least 150 years old and which we hope will last centuries, but about which we still don't know everything: often we don't even know what liquid Lo Bianco used to preserve them so well.
This is just one of the many unmissable stops in Naples,That's all for now, but in the next blogs I will delve deeper into the visit to MUSA, another pearl in the historic center and the incredible Church of the Souls of Purgatory.And you? How much would you like to have one of these incredible specimens in your collection?
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