Bonaguro Palace

The Naturalistic Section of the Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa preserves ancient and recent natural history collections. The historical, geological and botanical collections date back to the years of the foundation of the museum, when the Bassano geologist and naturalist Giambattista Brocchi, in 1828, left as a gift to the City of Bassano by will, his geo-palaeontological collections, his library and his manuscripts, so that the Civic Museum could be created. His student and collaborator Alberto Parolini, a botanist from Bassano, also donated his geological collections, his herbarium, his library and his manuscripts to the museum upon his death in 1867. This first nucleus then grew with the herbarium of the Bassano pharmacist and botanist Giovanni Montini, collaborator of A. Parolini. In recent times at the end of the last century, the entomological collections of Ferruccio and Mario Meneghetti were added, again by donation, and, recently, the Luca Cites collection has enriched the museum with a zoological collection with numerous mammals and birds. The museum also has minor naturalistic collections (in number, not importance) of shells (H. Nisters malacological collection), dragonflies, other herbaria and a small, but important, zoological collection of rare mammals, belonging to endangered species, entrusted at the museum in permanent storage by the Cites Service of the State Forestry Corps.

The natural history collections, in particular the historical ones, have undergone alternating conservation events over the course of almost two centuries since the museum was founded, ranging from valorisation to disinterest and total abandonment and degradation, also due to the tragedy of the bombing of Bassano, in which the museum was also involved in during World War II. The collections damaged (the herbaria in particular) by the bombings and subsequent negligence in conservation have no longer been exhibited to the public until today.