Organismi - Il Sistema Museale dell'Università di Palermo

The University Museum System of the University of Palermo should be understood as part of that dynamic, cultural and anthropological palimpsest, which extends and embraces the monumental Complex of the Steri, the 14th-century palace of the Chiaramonte family, seat of the Rectorate, and what lives in it, constituting, in fact, a living and pulsating organism. And such a nucleus, already rich, in addition to its architectural glory, its frescoes, its graffiti, and its admirable restoration work, in eighteenth-century canvases, engravings, and pictorial works placed in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus widening an arc stretched between modernity and contemporaneity, touching, by the way, one of its peaks with Guttuso's well-known “Vucciria,” radiates over our territory of knowledge.

Such a hinge, in fact, extends to the various sites scattered throughout the urban, natural, and geological fabric of the city of Palermo, thus corroborating the broad mosaic of the cultural and pedagogical vision that the University sets as one of its fundamental objectives.

And through the collections, from Basile to Ducrot, to the shelves filled with minerals, waxes, and instruments that have made the history of radiological diagnostics, to the evocative botanical paths where real life organisms make up one of the most interesting treasure chests in Europe and concentrated in the 18th-century Villa Giulia with its architecture and condensed fauna and flora in the Botanical Garden, and again the race along that mechanical organism in which engines, machinery of all sorts testify to the evolution of ingenuity and creativity fabrile, up to the sites of the university cosmos in which were discovered right in Palermo, by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè, Nobel Prize winner for Physics in 1959, Technetium, or, by Giuseppe Piazzi, in 1801, the asteroid Ceres Ferdinandea. All examples of that ‘marrow of reality,’ to use a term dear to Pavese, that tells us about ourselves, our work, our passions.