The world stage: passion and communication
Ulisse Aldrovandi, a man of the 1500s, five hundred years after his birth. For the University of Bologna, he is the first scientist whose manuscripts, notes and letters have been preserved to this day: a treasure trove of information gathered by a man with a far-reaching curiosity.
What interested Aldrovandi the naturalist, doctor, antiquarian, geologist, physicist, ethnographer and more besides? The world stage; the plurality of things and of events that made natural history a dense weave of images, stories and ancient yet contemporary references. Communication became his life goal, transiting from objects to drawings, from drawings to engraved pear wood blocks, and from the latter to the printed book. A titanic project, springing from the need to describe reality: a reality that recent geographical discoveries made much more varied and colourful than one might have thought just a few decades earlier. Aldrovandi welded the forms of ancient knowledge to the more recent ones of his times, building a fabulous collection in the process. He protected it from dispersion, making it public and donating it to the City Council. And so, after five hundred years, here it still is, reminding us that, for scientists, popularisation is not an option, it is a duty.
