History Trough Minerals

University of Naples ‘Federico II’ holds a huge patrimony of scientifc collections which testify its lively and high profiled research activity. In fact scientific museums compounding the Centro Museale host exclusively naturalistic specimens and instruments related to teaching and research. Collections are displayed in fascinating XVIII and XIX century rooms which were in some cases the same since foundation. This rich and heterogeneous world had been forgetting since changing in speculative methodologies gradually excluded scientific collections from everyday life of studies and researches. So, as in many other cases, naturalistic collection of Neapolitan university had risked to disappear. To avoid this waste in 1992 University Federico II founded a Centre, independent form departments, with its own regulation, management and financial autonomy. In almost twenty years trying to take care of these collections, cataloguing, restoring and exposing specimens or whole collections, which had been completely forgotten sometimes, many result had been reached. The challenge of Centro Museale is trying to reconcile past and future, communicating scientific information and its long history, at the same time, showing these museums as the place where the history of science had been going on across centuries. That’s why has been projected a virtual tour in which new technologies will allow, in a sense, a ‘rearrangement’ of museums’ collections without changing the historic display, just leaving visitors free to chose perspectives and themes.