Il Museo di Mineralogia della Sapienza Università di Roma 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 Palazzo della Sapienza, then the university headquarters and today hosting the State Archives.
The first director was Father Carlo Giuseppe Gismondi (1762-1824), a distinguished mineralogist, as demonstrated by the honor given to him by von Leonhard who dedicated a new mineral species, the zeolite named gismondite, to him. Gismondi managed the acquisition of the collection of the Veronese mineralogist Camillo Chierici, which formed the basis of the collection, and compiled 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 time at the Museum, succeeded in acquiring another 10,000 specimens, the result of collecting campaigns in Lazio, on the island of Elba, and in the Piedmont Alps, as well as exchanges and careful purchases.
At his death, the Museum’s collections contained as many as 896 species out of the 900 known at the time, as well as almost all Italian meteorites. The collection, currently composed of over 30,000 specimens of minerals (totaling 2500 species), meteorites, and gems, is undoubtedly one of the most important in Europe. Free visit is available.
