Casal de 'Pazzi Museum

The Casal de 'Pazzi Museum in Rome preserves a portion of the bed of an ancient river, which flowed about 200,000 years ago right where the museum structure now stands. The excavation of the deposit, carried out in the first half of the 1980s, has brought to light numerous geological, paleontological and archaeological finds through which it is possible, in the midst of the modern city, to imagine a prehistoric landscape that has disappeared and is very different from the current one. , characterized by large faunas, ancient volcanoes, and groups of hunter-gatherer men. In the Museum you can see some of the approximately 4,000 artifacts found in the excavations. These are fossils of animals typical of environments very different from ours. Some have become extinct, others are still present in other continents, such as some tropical and equatorial belts in Africa. Among the remains stand out those of the ancient Elephant, whose tusks reached 4 m in length; then there are rhinos, hippos, aurochs, deer and fallow deer, hyenas, wolves, horses, wild boars and water birds. Fossil leaves of Zelkova crenata were also found, a tree now widespread around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, but then widespread also in the Italian peninsula. Also exhibited are stones chipped by Paleolithic man and a fragment of a human skull. Observing the river bed, the visitor can immerse himself in the ancient Pleistocene landscape, also with the support of suggestive projections with virtual reconstructions on the life of men and animals of the time. Through the aid of didactic panels it is possible to deepen the history of the deposit, the geological evolution of the territory that surrounds it, the changes of environments, climates and ways of life during the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene garden, which surrounds the museum space, houses plants typical of the Pleistocene that can therefore be observed closely.