Two new educational and exhibition rooms dedicated to the minerals of Tuscany and to the invisible world of protistans enrich the vast scientific collection of the Museum of Natural History and Territory of the University of Pisa based at the 'Certosa' Monastery in Calci. These new spaces were inaugurated during a study convention in which Professor Paolo Orlandi, from the Earth Sciences Department, gave a paper on 'Mineral wealth in Tuscany: 2000 years of history and science,' and Graziano Di Giuseppe, from the Biology Department, spoke on 'Micro-organisms at the Museum: protistans in a new dimension of scientific disclosure.' After the inaugural papers there was a guided tour of the new rooms followed by a workshop entitled 'A project organised for scientific disclosure of knowledge on protistans' set up by the Italian Society of Protistanology 'Onlus'.
The opening of the new rooms fits nicely into the environment of the Museum's education policy, which is undergoing continuous evolution and expansion. It proposes educational and scientific projects and courses on the environment mainly for schools, but also for the general public interested in in-depth cultural and scientific studies.
How many minerals do you need to make a mobile phone or a car? How many minerals do we come across every day; even at our homes? And how many do we use thanks to instruments that technology, old or new, builds so as to make our lives more simple? These are some of the questions the exhibition entitled 'The mineral wealth of Tuscany', dedicated to "useful minerals", aims to answer by starting out with the ancient mining history of our region through its most important findings.
Mineralisation in pyrite (iron disulphide) of southern Tuscany, the hematite (ferric oxide) mines on the Island of Elba, the silver strands of the Apuane Alps are some of the examples of this history demonstrated by the samples on display in the show cases.
These minerals have favoured the development of the great Etruscan and Roman civilisations and up until the first half of the 20th century they represented an important resource for our territory. Today, the economic value of these minerals has diminished , but their historical, scientific and museological importance has increased and their heritage remains to be studied and valued.
The exhibition was organised by the Department of Earth Sciences, in particular by Professors Paolo Orlandi Christian Biagioni and Elena Bonaccorsi, and by the Museum , represented by Massimo Cerri.
Also the new educational and exhibition room on Protistanology starts off with a few queries. What are protistans? What is their evolutionary importance and their relevance in the ecological and sanitary fields? These unicellular micro-organisms initially acquired a structure similar to our cells and, for this, they are considered the creators of the largest evolutionary leap in the history of living organisms. As indicators of quality levels of the environment they are, furthermore, considered to be of valuable sanitary interest and of great importance to institutional involvement in public health. Among them, in fact, we find agents of infectious diseases like malaria, toxoplasmosis and leishmaniasis.
The room was created thanks to a project funded my MIUR (Ministry of Education for University Research) whose executive partners are the Museum, the Italian Society of Protistanology 'onlus' and the Italian National Association of Natural Science Teachers.