The first museum nucleus was formed in 1927 with a paleontological collection housed in the hall of the Municipal Archive located in the 13th-century Palazzo del Podestà, the town hall. Since 1990, the museum has been set up in the former Santo Spirito Hospital, a 16th-century building of recognized architectural and urbanistic value, as it is the only remaining example in Castell’Arquato of arcades connected to the Via Francigena. The collection consists of an initial nucleus formed by the collection of fossil mollusks belonging to lawyer and collector Odoardo Bagatti and the remains of a fossil cetacean found in 1934 on the Monte Falcone badlands by Dr. Agostino Menozzi. The materials predominantly come from the local territory whose particular Pliocene formation, known as “Piacenzian”, has yielded rare specimens of fossil cetaceans, including the aforementioned one from Monte Falcone and another found in 1983 in the Rio Carbonaro badlands. The exhibition path is mainly characterized by three types of collections: the malacofauna of the Piacenzian, the Pliocene cetaceans, and the Quaternary Po Valley vertebrates, to which the mineralogical and petrological nuclei have been added over time, the latter formed during research campaigns in extra-European areas. Of particular interest is the presence, in the central hall of the museum, of a gigantic wooden sculpture by Giorgio Rastelli, which reproduces a life-size minke whale.
Information about Geological Museum “G. Cortesi”
Via Sforza Caolzio, 57,
29014 Castell’Arquato (Piacenza)
0523 803215
info@museogeologico.it
iatcastellarquato@gmail.com (manager) for hours, prices, openings, practical information
Source: MIBACT
