Palazzo Poggi

The building presents a compact urban plan centered on a large square courtyard. The courtyard is surrounded by a loggia, and a wide staircase rises to the piano nobile, the main reception floor. These internal arrangements date to the sixteenth-century remodelling commissioned by the Poggi family and remain the organising core of the palace.

Rising from the palace complex is La Specola, the tower observatory, constructed between 1712 and 1725. The tower functioned as a place for astronomical observation and stands as a clear early-18th-century addition to the Renaissance body of the building. It survives as an attached vertical element that marks the site’s scientific use in the Enlightenment.

A separate library building was added in 1744 and a monumental assembly or great hall was opened on the north side in 1756. These eighteenth-century constructions were created to serve the needs of the Institute of Sciences and the expanding university collections, and they form an integral part of the palace complex today.

Interior decoration is extensive and concentrated on wall and ceiling frescoes executed in Mannerist and early Baroque styles. The decorative scheme follows a combined symbolic and naturalist programme and includes named cycles: the Rooms of Moses, David, and the Sphinxes; the Rooms of Susanna and of the Zodiac; the Rooms of Camilla and landscape scenes; a concert hall decorated with representations of the Labors of Hercules and putti at work in winemaking; and rooms of grotteschi and powerful telamons. These frescoed chamber ensembles remain an essential component of the palace’s artistic fabric.

Ground-level spaces include an assembly room dedicated to the poet Giosuè Carducci, where he lectured for decades, and the Hercules Room, which contains a large statue of the mythological hero carved in 1730. The palace also houses a suite of university museums and the main university library, together with a picture gallery holding more than six hundred portraits and a seventeenth-century globe by Vincenzo Maria Coronelli.

Collections related to anatomy, natural history and the Marsili collections are preserved within the building. Anatomical exhibits comprise wax models and childbirth models, including the celebrated “Venerina” by Clemente Susini, waxes by Ercole Lelli and by Giovanni and Anna Morandi Manzolini. Historical natural-history holdings include material associated with Ulisse Aldrovandi as well as the Luigi Ferdinando Marsili collections. These artefacts and displays remain installed within rooms of the palace and form the core of its museum holdings.