The Mineralogy Museum of Sapienza University of Rome was founded on November 13, 1804, by Pope Pius VII with the brief “Uberes dum menti nostrae” and inaugurated in 1806 in its first prestigious location: the Sapienza palace, then the university headquarters and today hosting the State Archives.
Its first director was Father Carlo Giuseppe Gismondi (1762-1824), a distinguished mineralogist, as demonstrated by the honor granted to him by von Leonhard by dedicating a new mineral species, the zeolite called gismondite, to him. Gismondi oversaw the acquisition of the collection of the Veronese mineralogist Camillo Chierici, which constituted the foundation of the collection, and compiled the first systematic and reasoned catalog of the collection.
The true “”father of the Museum”” was the mineralogist Giovanni Strüver (1842-1915), the discoverer of sellaite and gastaldite, and to whom Ferruccio Zambonini, his distinguished pupil, dedicated struverite. During his time at the Museum, Strüver managed to acquire another 10,000 specimens, the result of collection campaigns in Lazio, the island of Elba, and the Piedmont Alps, as well as through exchanges and careful purchases.
At his death, the Museum’s collections included as many as 896 species out of the 900 known at the time, along with almost all Italian meteorites. The collection, currently composed of over 30,000 mineral specimens (totaling 2500 species), meteorites, and gems, is undoubtedly one of the most important in Europe. Free admission for self-guided visits.
