As with other scientific museums of the University of Rome, the museum of Comparative Anatomy “Battista Grassi” draws its origins from the museum of Mineralogy et Historia Naturalis which in 1805, during the Pontificate of Pius VII, was set up at the Achiginnasio of Sapienza.
Many of the exhibited pieces are registered in the handwritten catalog dating back to around 1850, preserved at the State Archive. Other objects are even older: they derive from the celebrated collection that the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher organized around the first half of the seventeenth century at the Roman College and which was dismantled following the confiscation of ecclesiastical goods after the capture of Rome.
Their belonging to the Kircherian collection is documented through the description in the catalogs of the Kircherian Museum which Bonanni compiled in 1709. Large vertebrate skeletons are exhibited, among which those of a common whale and a sperm whale. One room is reserved for a collection of microscopy instruments ranging from Leeuwenhoek’s microscope to modern transmission and scanning electron microscopes.
