This room is home to many curious objects, some of which will require a magnifying glass to be studied closely. These are teaching collections used by professors and students of Padua Botanical Institute in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to learn about the plant world.

What was it like to study in the botanical garden at that time? Students were required to know everything about mushrooms, seeds, woods, and useful plants - both weed and edible varieties. They had to practice recognizing details, shapes, special preparations.

Here we find Raffaèllo Sernagiòtto’s “centùrie”, a collection of various teaching boxes dating back to the early twentieth century. Each box contains a variety of seeds and fruits that are very different in shape, size and colour, but all from the Italian countryside. The collection focuses only on common species and therefore offers a precise picture of the biodiversity present in the countryside over a century ago.

Then there are the mushrooms in beeswax, produced by Carlo Avogàdro degli Azzòni, in the 1830s; and those in clay dating about forty years later, by Egìsto Tòrtori. The collection of tree sections was the brainchild of Adriano Fiòri, who wanted to combine them with the samples already present in the herbal to further knowledge relating to tree and shrub species. For this he designed a special microtome, a machine which he used (from 1905 to 1927) to obtain transversal and longitudinal sections with a thickness of less than a millimetre. The Padua collection of 215 samples is complete and present in its original version.

This room also displays six excellent botanical wall panels dated late nineteenth century, the result of teamwork between artists, scientists and publishers. The topics covered are varied and range from exotic plants to different ways of seed dispersion, various pollination strategies and internal tissue morphology.

The wooden wheels, on the other hand, illustrate how appearance and colour allow identification of a species when it has no leaves. Even today, these sections and the bark that surrounds them are of primary importance for forest science students, but also for artisans who want to learn more about the colour, hardness and density of the material they will use for their work.

Then there are the seeds. For example, the so-called “coco de mer”, found floating in the Indian Ocean. It is the seed of a palm tree that grows only on certain islands of the Seychelles and produces the largest seeds in the plant kingdom, weighing up to 25 kilos! Characterised by its strong resemblance to a woman’s hips, in the Middle Ages it was believed to have aphrodisiac powers. Smaller but no less important are the seeds of native ornamental, food, medicinal or spontaneous species contained in the Museum’s 16,000 test tubes.

Established thanks to exchanges between Italian and foreign gardens and botanical gardens, this archive is also a precious source of data for recovering ancient crops.