A small door located on the western front of the Monastery of San Giovanni, towards the current Borgo Pipa (formerly Borgo S. Giovanni), opens the tour of the Antica Spezieria. Although the first news of a Spezieria inside the Benedictine Monastery of San Giovanni Evangelista dates back to 1201, the year of its opening to the public, its existence is close to the millennium. A door with a beautiful carved eagle in wood, the symbol of St. John the Evangelist, leads to the second room, the so-called “mortar room”. The marble and bronze mortars, of various shapes and sizes, indispensable tools of the pharmacist for grinding and grinding herbs, date back to the 17th and 18th centuries. The next room, called “delle Sirene”, owes its name to the allegorical figures carved in the pilasters of the shelves which, in turn, contain a rich set of vases, albarelli, manuscripts and rare pharmaceutical publications from the 16th-19th centuries. The fourth room is the actual laboratory, with the well and the entrance to the cellar, where many of the spices used for the preparation of medicines were kept. Among the rare furnishings in the room, in addition to the sixteenth-century Veronese marble washbasins, a series of stills and glass bottles hanging on the walls stand out, of different origins and almost all dating back to the eighteenth century. These objects constitute the most significant testimony of the intense activity of drug production carried out by the monastery's apothecary, which over time added to the more common and traditional processing procedures of the pharmaceutical workshop those introduced by the alchemical practice and its tools.