by InTrieste
On a winter morning in Trieste, the natural world of the Karst plateau and its underground caves will take center stage inside the city’s Museum of Natural History, where even the smallest creatures are given room to tell a larger story.
On Saturday, December 20, at 11 a.m., the museum will offer a guided visit devoted to the insects of the Carso and the fauna that inhabit caves, led by Andrea Colla, an entomologist on the museum’s staff. The visit is designed to bring the public into closer contact with species that are rarely seen, yet are central to the ecological balance of northeastern Italy.
The tour begins in the museum’s exhibition halls, where carefully constructed displays recreate environments such as grasslands and subterranean caves. Oversized models of insects and other small animals—magnified up to twenty times—allow visitors to study details of form and structure that are normally invisible to the naked eye.
From there, participants will be taken into the microscopy laboratory, where selected specimens will be observed under the microscope. The final portion of the visit opens the doors to two of the museum’s storage areas, which together contain roughly one million preserved specimens, including beetles, butterflies, crustaceans, spiders, scorpions and other arthropods collected over decades of research.
The guided visit is included with the price of standard museum admission. The Museum of Natural History is located at Via dei Tominz 4, in Trieste.
