Description
Venice's Natural History Museum, named after Giancarlo Ligabue, occupies the Fondaco dei Turchi, a 13th-century palace on the Grand Canal in the Santa Croce district. Dinosaurs, fossils and collectors' curiosities: a museum that kids love too.
The highlight is the skeleton of the Ouranosaurus, a dinosaur found in the Sahara in Niger by the 1972-1973 Ligabue expedition, next to that of the Sarcosuchus, a huge extinct relative of crocodiles. On the ground floor is the Cetacean Gallery; upstairs, a reconstruction of a 16th- and 17th-century wunderkammer.
The palace itself deserves a look too, with its long arcaded loggia on the water. From 1621 it was the warehouse of the Ottoman merchants, with storerooms, bedrooms and a prayer hall: the last Turk was sent away in 1838. The battlements and turrets, on the other hand, were added in the 19th-century restoration.
The highlight is the skeleton of the Ouranosaurus, a dinosaur found in the Sahara in Niger by the 1972-1973 Ligabue expedition, next to that of the Sarcosuchus, a huge extinct relative of crocodiles. On the ground floor is the Cetacean Gallery; upstairs, a reconstruction of a 16th- and 17th-century wunderkammer.
The palace itself deserves a look too, with its long arcaded loggia on the water. From 1621 it was the warehouse of the Ottoman merchants, with storerooms, bedrooms and a prayer hall: the last Turk was sent away in 1838. The battlements and turrets, on the other hand, were added in the 19th-century restoration.