The Scientific Museums of Rome

In recent years, Rome has made enormous efforts to make ever more profitable the immense artistic and archaeological treasures which the city conserves; however, had it stopped there, a grave error would have been perpetrated. Instead the need has been felt to take another (indeed an imperative) step, making the cultural program already in action even more global and integrated; the city’s interest has therefore been directed towards an effective use of the scientific culture, connecting the existing structures with the ambitious project of a City of Science.

In contrast with the current tendency in national government to marginalise science, the City has started to offer more and more scientific explanation, and that of high quality.

The oldest of us remember how in the last decades the city has diversified its cultural offerings with a quantity of scientific exhibitions, to which the public responded with great enthusiasm, visitors attending in numbers higher than are considered usual by museological standards in Rome.

All of these exhibitions, then, inaugurated a new way of communicating scientific fact, adopting a more up to date communicative strategy:
- they sought to attract the greatest possible number of visitors, using captivating titles, easily comprehensible texts and contents, and an exhibition lay out in which science and spectacle existed together with reciprocal benefits;
- they sought to reach the visitor in their deepest sensibility, seeking to stimulate, above all, curiosity;
- stimulating curiosity they triggered a virtuous mechanism, that of interest, which leads to autonomous investigation to understand the facts and mechanisms of nature.

For instance, evolution and the phylogenetics of dinosaurs were narrated through the appeal of dinosaurs; the laws of ecology and the necessity of sustainable development through giant robotic insects; the frontiers of material physics through high tech machines; and the secrets of DNA through enormously enlarged cellular models.

The same philosophy that had been used for these temporary exhibitions was also applied to the Scientific Museums, which were restructured and recreated anew.

From this initiative the huge and fortunate relaunch of the Civic Museum of Zoology began, changing it from a “crystallised zoo for specialists” to an “exhibition of biological concepts”, concepts illustrated with a few, well-chosen natural objects.
- We have created a new exhibition space, the Museum of Mathematics, dedicated to a discipline which is extremely difficult to “display”.
- We are entirely rethinking the exhibition system of the medical-historical collection conserved in the National Museum of Medical Art.
- We are contributing to the birth of a “Permanent Centre” in the Via Panisperna, a project financed by the government, which will give the city a space in which the Physics group of the Via Panisperna can be celebrated, alongside accounts of the most advanced research in the field of physics.
- Today we are concluding the work which has given Rome a New Planetarium at the Museum of Roman Culture.
- Together with the Planetarium we are inaugurating a new Astronomical Museum.
- We are thinking of a comprehensive project which will see a strong relaunch of the notable complex of the scientific collections of the La Sapienza University.
- A small project, financed by Miur, should also be mentioned: it is Museomobile, and it brings assistance and materials to schools, allowing them to organise their own small scientific exhibitions.
- And last, but not least, a project completely dedicated to schools, a Centre for the advancement of scientific culture in schools (CIPS). In collaboration with the Istituto Leonardo da Vinci we are planning a series of “learning centres” in the former Istituto Nathan, in Santa Maria Maggiore:
o A new museum space for science teaching
o A laboratory space completely dedicated to schools, in which to facilitate the understanding of cutting-edge scientific research
o An exhibition space where schools can experiment for themselves, organizing scientific exhibitions for other schools and for the general public
o A documentation centre for the city and its hinterland.
To accomplish this series of operations the Municipality of Rome has taken the opportunity to rationalize its administrative and operational system, creating a specific sector dedicated to the Scientific Museums and the advancement of scientific culture in the city.
And it is this new sector for the Scientific Museums which is dedicating a large part of its activities to an ambitious project, which constitutes a major and difficult challenge for Rome: to bring to completion Rome’s City of Science.
The City is driving itself to create small chinks and fissures through which children, and also adults, can start to perceive the splendour of nature and the laws which govern it.

Through these bursts of light we make visible the “lumps of science” since, despite everything, the number of things that science has managed to decipher and interpret is small, compared to the great natural systems. It is for us today to make the young curious about a small part of what we now know, so that tomorrow we will be able to discover more.