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 seat and today housing the State Archives.
The first director was Father Carlo Giuseppe Gismondi (1762-1824), a distinguished mineralogist, as evidenced by the honor given to him by von Leonhard in dedicating a new mineral species, the zeolite named gismondite. Gismondi oversaw the acquisition of the collection of the Veronese mineralogist Camillo Chierici, which formed the basis of the collection, and prepared 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 student, dedicated struverite. Strüver, during his stay at the Museum, managed to acquire another 10,000 specimens, the result of collecting campaigns in Lazio, on the island of Elba, and in the Piedmontese Alps, as well as exchanges and shrewd purchases.
At his death, the Museum’s collections contained as many as 896 species of the 900 then known as well as almost all Italian meteorites. The collection, currently composed of over 30,000 specimens of minerals (for a total of 2,500 species), meteorites, and gems, is undoubtedly one of the most important in Europe. The free visit is free of charge.
