Description
The oldest specimens in the collection were inherited from the Medici and Habsburg-Lorraine families. One example is the large Indian elephant (Elephas maximus) which, according to Targioni Tozzetti, was displayed alive in the Loggia dei Lanzi in the mid-seventeenth century. The skeleton has survived and is now displayed at the centre of the large "Hall of Skeletons". Another curious presence in the museum is that of the naturalized specimen of a hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius): according to some researchers, it lived in the Boboli Gardens at the time of Grand Duke Peter Leopold around the second half of the 1700s. Among the many specimens whose importance is not only scientific but also historical, we can mention some New World monkeys donated by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany Maria Antonia of Bourbon in 1845. After the opening of the museum to the public in 1775, new specimens continued to be added to the Lorraine collection and the greatest increases occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century and around the middle of the twentieth century. They were the years of the great exploratory expeditions in Africa, but also in South America and Asia. The most famous people associated with these enterprises, and those involved in the collection and conservation of the specimens, were: King Victor Emmanuel II, who donated some individuals that had died in Florence's Royal Zoological Garden in the period 1863-71; Marquis Orazio Antinori, who collected in Ethiopia for the Italian Geographical Society in 1880; Count Giacomo Savorgnan di Brazzà, who collected in French Congo and Belgian Congo (presently the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1884; Dr. Leopoldo Traversi, who donated specimens captured in Ethiopia in 1887; Cavalier Leonardo Fea, who collected specimens in Burma in 1887-88; Prof. Nello Beccari, who led an expedition in British Guiana in 1931-32; Victor Emmanuel Duke of Savoy and Aosta, Count of Turin, who willed to the museum a rich collection of specimens of diverse provenience; Dr. Ugo Funaioli, who collected numerous specimens in Tanzania around 1950. Also important were the expeditions of the University of Florence and the CSFET in East Africa, which began in 1959 and ended abruptly in 1987 on account of the war and civil disorder that still torment Somalia. Today the collection is particularly rich in Italian specimens, especially small mammals from all Italian regions. They belonging to order Soricomorpha, Chiroptera and Rodentia, and are preserved in alcohol and dry, which are studied by numerous Italian and foreign specialists. Another important contribution to the growth of the mammal collection was the establishment of the Cetacean Research Centre, starting in 1986: it has operated a network for the reporting and recovery of cetaceans stranded on the Italian coast. The collection includes 46 types. Mammals that were part of the Central Collection of Italian Vertebrates (Giglioli Collection) are incorporated in the mammal collection.
Purposes
This is a sub-collection of https://registry.gbif.org/collection/7856d07e-2e9b-4b56-a524-c2e1b830e40a. Partial catalogues were bublished by Vanni & al. (1991), Veracini & al. (2010) and Agnelli & al. (2014). Information updated thanks to the internal University of Florence Museal System (UNIFI-SMA) digitization dashboard, compiled in October 2021.
