Civic Museum of Rovereto

The museum is housed inside Palazzo Parolari. 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 with casts of dinosaur footprints discovered at Lavini di Marco. The first room hosts a selection of the ornithological collection, the most important in the province with 1200 specimens, mostly of local origin. This is followed by sections dedicated to European mammals, particularly alpine ones (bear, wolf, deer, ibex, chamois, etc.) and exotic ones (lion, leopard, monkey). The remaining three rooms house the archaeological collections. In special showcases, pre-protohistoric artifacts are exhibited (polished stone axes, flint tools, copper alloy artifacts, terracotta), materials from the Roman and medieval periods, coins, and tombstones – largely coming from accidental finds and excavation campaigns at various sites in southern Trentino (Corsi d’Isera, Corno di Mori, Castel Corno caves, Pizzini di Castellano, Colombo di Mori, etc.) – as well as the rich and heterogeneous collection of antiquities left by Orsi in Rovereto, which includes many materials from Magna Grecia and over 1100 specimens of Greek coins. On the third floor, spaces have been created for temporary exhibitions and a conference hall, while the ground floor hosts, in addition to exhibition spaces, an area where the 160-year history of the important cultural institution is narrated. In the Museum garden, there is a state-of-the-art Planetarium, a sophisticated instrument to reveal the mysteries of the starry sky, which constitutes – together with the Monte Zugna Astronomical Observatory active since 1997 – 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 Palazzo éccheli-Baisi; from the Roman Villa at Isera to the eighteenth-century Palazzo Alberti on Corso Bettini with the permanent exhibition of the Carlo Fait bequest, ending with Sperimentarea, a “citadel for scientific research and education” with spaces dedicated to experimental archaeology and naturalistic activities, located at the Bosco della Città, not far from the city center.

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