ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Popular with the people: Local visitors in the Museum of Physics and Natural History of la Specola (Florence, 1780s)

• In Event: A New Kind of Amusement for Cultivating the Mind: Science Popularisation in Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century

English Abstract

The museum of la Specola, founded in Florence in 1775, was a museum dedicated to natural sciences and physics. Created by the Grand-Duke with the mission to help educate the people of Tuscany, the museum was free and easy to access, provided visitors signed in, and it was extremely successful as a local attraction, with 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a year going through its collections in the 1780s. The fact that it was free also allowed it to attract a more diverse audience than many other well-known scientific collections such as private museums that were opened on recommendation only.
This paper will focus on the local Tuscan and Florentine population and how they interacted with the institution: where they came from, when they came, who they came with, what they did inside. Setting aside the foreign tourists who are well-known visitors of Italian museums in the eighteenth century, and tracking figures who, through lack of sources, have sometimes appeared as marginal in the history of science: women, children, common people of the lower classes. Echoing other papers on this panel, this presentation highlights how science-learning was perceived as leisure, to be enjoyed on holidays and in the family, I will also show how keen people outside of the traditional elites were to engage with scientific topics. Ultimately, this paper provides a window into what the popularity of science meant from the point of view of audience members.

Author

• Elena Romero-Passerin, University of Bristol