Like other scientific museums of the University of Rome, the Comparative Anatomy Museum “Battista Grassi” traces its origins to the Mineralogy and Natural History Museum established in 1805, during the pontificate of Pius VII, at the Achiginnasio of the Sapienza.
Many of the exhibited pieces are recorded in the handwritten catalog dated around 1850, preserved at the State Archive. Other objects are even older: they come from the famous collection organized by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher around the first half of the seventeenth century at the Collegio Romano, which was dismantled following the confiscation of church property after the capture of Rome.
Their belonging to the Kircherian collection is documented through the descriptions in the catalogs of the Kircherian Museum compiled by Bonanni in 1709. The museum displays large vertebrate skeletons, including those of a common whale and a sperm whale. One room is dedicated to a collection of microscopy instruments ranging from Leeuwenhoek’s microscope to modern transmission and scanning electron microscopes.
