Museo Civico di Rovereto

The museum is housed inside the Parolari Palace. The permanent exhibition path 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 the 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. Following are the 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 display cases, pre-protohistoric finds are exhibited (polished stone axes, flint tools, copper alloy artifacts, terracottas), materials from the Roman and medieval periods, coins and tombstones – mostly from accidental discoveries and excavation campaigns in various sites of southern Trentino (Isera courses, Corno di Mori, grottos of Castel Corno, Castellano’s Pizzini, Colombo of Mori, etc.) – but also the rich and heterogeneous collection of antiquities left by Orsi in Rovereto, which includes many materials from Magna Graecia and over 1100 specimens of Greek coins. On the third floor, spaces have been created for temporary exhibitions and a conference room, while the ground floor houses, besides exhibition spaces, an environment where the 160 years of history of this important cultural institution are narrated. In the Museum garden there is a very modern Planetarium, a sophisticated instrument to unveil the mysteries of the starry sky, which constitutes – together with the Monte Zugna astronomical Observatory active since 1997 – the astronomy section of the Museum. Outside and inside 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 of Isera to the 18th-century Palazzo Alberti on Corso Bettini with the permanent exhibition of the Carlo Fait bequest, finishing with Sperimentarea, a “citadel for scientific research and teaching” with spaces dedicated to experimental archaeology and naturalistic activities, at Bosco della Città, a short distance from the city center.

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