Museo di storia naturale Faraggiana Ferrandi

A museum between two cultures. Novara's natural history collections are rooted in the cultural and social history of the city, which in the Napoleonic era had a prestigious Liceo with important educational collections and a botanical garden.
Later, as exponents of a cultured class, curious about non-European phenomena and civilisations, Catherine Faraggiana Ferrandi and her son Alessandro set up a zoo and museum in their park in Meina, later donated to Novara and reorganised in 1959 in the family palace.
Recent numerous acquisitions and new scientific attention have breathed new life into an institution where science and history naturally interpenetrate.
The Novara collection is the second largest zoological collection in Piedmont with around 2,500 specimens of more than 1,200 vertebrate species, as well as entomological collections totalling almost 10,000 insects.
In addition to a selection of objects from the Ferrandi Ethnographic Museum on display at the museum's entrance, the latest addition to the exhibition system in chronological order is undoubtedly the multisensory route, which, thanks to the introduction of installations, captions and tactile, sound and olfactory devices, allows the exhibition halls to be fully accessible to the visually and hearing impaired. In addition, the total absence of architectural barriers allows the museum to be visited by all motor disabled people, thus making the museum accessible to every possible type of visitor.