Museo per la Storia dell’Università di Pavia

Located in the university's central building, the museum houses manuscripts, printed texts, scientific instruments, anatomical and naturalistic preparations that testify to the history of one of the oldest universities in Italy, founded in 1361. The main collections, of physics and medicine, have an original nucleus dating back to the second half of the 18th century, when, following the reforms ordered by Maria Theresa of Austria, the University of Pavia became one of the most avant-garde scientific centres in Europe.

The physics section has developed around the instruments from Alessandro Volta's laboratory, the medicine section is heir to the anatomical collections that Antonio Scarpa collected in the very rooms that now house the museum.

Absolutely not to be missed are the splendid 18th-century instruments purchased by Volta that flank his inventions and are displayed in period cabinets, the life-size anatomical waxes modelled in the last quarter of the 18th century, the refined surgical paraphernalia in ivory and steel donated to the University by Emperor Joseph II and, finally, the microscopes and documents related to the work of Camillo Golgi, the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1906 thanks to research that formed the basis of neuroanatomical studies.