La Specola, Museum of Zoology & Natural History, Florence

Rated 4.5 out of 5 on trip advisor, this is one place that is definitely worth visiting: there are many different things to see. One of the signs suggested there are over 1,400 items in the collection.

Each room you go to has a theme. From memory, there was: 

• A room full of: butterflies, bees, wasps and other small flying creatures
• Crabs and other crustaceans
• I was shocked to find several rooms full of large African and Asian mammals: lions, tigers, hyenas, leopards, rhino, foxes, deer in all their various forms
• Birds – hundreds and hundreds of them
• Fish – again, hundreds upon hundreds of them
• Sea urchins of all forms including the jaw of a great white shark. 

I didn't realise that great white sharks have teeth that grow in layers - so behind the first set of teeth, there's another set, behind that there's another set and so on. Apparently, according to my brother in law, it is because their teeth break easily so they have continuous growth and replacement.

I must admit that my favourite time to go to a museum is when I have an audio guide or someone explaining what I am looking at. I am far too lazy to read all the little descriptions!

Although I liked the stuffed animals I think it is a great waste to kill the earth’s finite stock of mammals for the mere purpose of satisfying people’s intellectual curiosity. I would much rather look at a collection of fake man-made pieces depicting what the animals look like. What’s even more soul destroying is that this is just one collection, there might be hundreds like it across the globe. That said, the museum boasts having the largest collection.

My favourite part of the exhibition was the wax works of the human body from the 1700s and the 1800s. It was a lesson in anatomy and physiology. One of the rooms showed the different stages of embryonic growth (albeit all showing an embryo as though it looks like a baby from the get go); this continued with wax works showing different stages of pregnancy and labour.

If you had to choose between a museum and this collection, I say go to this, 100%. Entrance EUR6.

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