As with other scientific museums of the University of Rome, the Comparative Anatomy Museum “Battista Grassi” traces its origins to the Museum of Mineralogy et Historia Naturalis which in 1805, during the Pontificate of Pius VII, was set up at the Achiginnasio of the Sapienza.
Many of the displayed pieces are recorded in the handwritten catalog dating back to around 1850, preserved at the State Archives. 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 properties after the capture of Rome.
Their belonging to the Kircherian collection is documented through the description in the catalogs of the Kircherian Museum that Bonanni compiled in 1709. Large vertebrate skeletons are exhibited, including 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.
