There's no way around it; Florence is crowded. It may well be that Naples is the only Italian city that isn't overrun with tourists in the summer, but after three days of hardly seeing another traveler, I wasn't really prepared for the crowds in Florence.
Florence is, admittedly, more of what tourists expect Italy to be. There's no graffiti, the streets are free of trash and the city looks like something out of a fairy tale cliché -- narrow, winding streets, beautiful river walks and plenty of English-speaking waiters. And so they come.
Of course how much you'll enjoy La Specola depends a little bit on how much you enjoy wandering through rooms filled with dead animals. My father taught biology and zoology for many years, so I grew up around dead animals, but clearly, La Specola is not for everyone.
Part of the appeal of the museum is simply the antique wooden cabinets used to house the various lions, leopards, monkeys, birds and butterflies. The old, uneven and warped glass ripples as you pass, distorts the view from the corner of your eye, giving all the animals a shimmering hint of movement, as if there were still a bit of life left somewhere behind the glass.
Beautiful glass aside, what makes La Specola special is how amazingly old the specimens are. La Specola records the very beginnings of natural science as we know it. The visible specimen tags I could read ranged from the early 1700s up through the late 1800s and into the 1900s. A few specimens come from the Medici family's private collection and are even older. That means the vast majority of the animals in La Specola date from well before Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, and some were brought to Florence even before Linnaeus had come up with the means of organizing them.
Of course stuffed specimens from 300 years ago aren't going to be in the best of shape. Feathers have fallen off many of the birds, scales have dropped from the fish, the large mammals have badly dried and cracked hides and the natural coloring has long since faded from many.
What's fascinating isn't so much the specimens themselves, but the glimpse they offer into the curious minds of the time. When La Specola was founded in 1771, western culture was just beginning to shrug off thousands of years of religious dogma, dropping a vision of the world where everything was the province of god, for a vision of the world in which the human mind could explore on its own. La Specola hails from the very beginning of that yearning to know more about the world, to reject doctrine and discover first hand the creatures that share our planet.
In the late 17th and early 18th century there was an explosion of exploration, travel and discovery. The "age of discovery" as it's commonly called in hindsight, was the age of people like you and me, curious about the world and determined to see it for themselves, stumbling around, finding what they found. In the case of zoologists much of what they found was sent back here, to La Specola. It was a unique time, there were no professional scientists yet, no authorities or academic review boards, everything was new, everything was a discovery.
Yes, there's something perverse about heading out into the world, discovering exotic and fascinating animals and then killing, gutting and stuffing them. It's gruesome business if you go into the details. There's no reason to do it now, but circa 1700 it was the only link between those who could go into the field and those who stayed behind to make sense of it all.
La Specola is a link between then and now. A record of the conversation between those who discovered and those who took discoveries and turned them into something meaningful. Stuffed carcasses are not particularly meaningful in and of themselves. Colorful perhaps, exotic and even alien in some cases, but finding and recording is only half of what creates the store of human understanding. La Specola lays that conversation open for anyone to walk through and experience.
If stuffed and canned dead animals aren't enough to keep the tourists at bay, then the last two rooms certainly are. The last section of La Specola is nothing but wax models of dissected human bodies, flayed open to varying degrees to show muscle structure, viens, organs and even nerves. The models were created in the 1800s from real human bodies and were used to teach anatomy to medical students. The models are remarkably life-like and cover the entire spectrum of human existence from stillborn, syphilis-riddled fetuses to otherwise healthy adults and even larger-than-life skeletons.
At first glance the wax models are a touch disturbing, not necessarily because they're life-like, but because they put us on the same shelves, in the same warped glass cases. Otherwise, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We are after all just one more animal roaming the planet. But a curious, inquisitive animal that can dream anything it wants, including a natural science to explain how curious inquisitive animals can dream anything they want... just remember, it's turtles all the way down.