Civic Museum of Rovereto

The museum is housed inside the Parolari Palace. The permanent exhibition route is located in six rooms on the second floor, awaiting the rearrangement of new sections on the ground floor, including the Paleontological section featuring casts of dinosaur footprints discovered at the Lavini di Marco. The first room hosts a selection of the ornithological collection, the most important in the province with 1200 specimens, mostly from the local area. Next are the sections dedicated to European mammals, especially alpine species (bear, wolf, deer, ibex, chamois, etc.) and exotic ones (lion, leopard, monkey). The remaining three rooms display archaeological collections. In special showcases, pre-protohistoric artifacts (polished stone axes, flint tools, copper alloy items, terracottas), Roman and medieval materials, coins, and tombstones are exhibited – mostly from chance finds and excavation campaigns in various sites of southern Trentino (Isera courses, Corno di Mori, Castel Corno caves, Castellano Pizzini, Mori Colombo, etc.) – as well as the rich and heterogeneous collection of antiquities left by Orsi to Rovereto, which includes many materials from Magna Graecia and over 1100 Greek coin specimens. On the third floor, rooms have been arranged for temporary exhibitions and a conference hall, while the ground floor hosts, besides exhibition spaces, an area where the 160-year history of this important cultural institution is narrated. In the Museum garden is a state-of-the-art Planetarium, a sophisticated instrument to unveil the mysteries of the starry sky, which together with the Monte Zugna Astronomical Observatory active since 1997 forms the Museum’s astronomy section. Inside and outside the city, the Civic Museum of Rovereto manages other cultural and experimental sites: from the paleontological site of Lavini di Marco with footprints of carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago to the botanical garden in Brentonico at the Éccheli-Baisi Palace; from the Roman Villa of Isera to the 18th-century Alberti Palace on Corso Bettini with the permanent exhibition of the Carlo Fait legacy, ending with Sperimentarea, a “citadel for scientific research and education” with spaces dedicated to experimental archaeology and naturalistic activities, located in the City Woods, near the city centre.

In 2011, the rooms on the ground floor were also opened with sections on mineralogy, petrology, paleontology, and invertebrates.