Collections of Cabinet of Natural History

The Xylological Collections

The Xilotecas illustrate the great variety of mainly Italian but also exotic arboreal entities and consist mainly of portions of tree trunks represented in the form of vertically sectioned trunks hinged like books. There are three most significant nuclei:

– the collection of woods from Tuscany, which includes over 200 artifacts and which was awarded at various national and international exhibitions, such as the 1851 London Universal Exposition and the 1854 Exposition of Tuscan Products in Florence

– the collection of precious woods from warm climate regions, consisting of 32 samples from the East Indies and West Indies; the result of commercial activities on the route of the Indies, the collection, albeit modest in size, clearly expresses the function of documentation of the territory, including typical woods with commodity and commercial value, such as ebony and mahogany

– the wood sample from Cuba, represented by 37 small parallelepipeds of exclusively Cuban wood; the uniqueness of the provenance and the presence of local names in some of the samples make this collection a significant exhibition of local timber.

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