The Porta Room

This room, dedicated to Luigi Porta (1800-1875), houses preparations and finds, experience protocols and clinical charts originally held at the Museum that Porta started at the San Matteo Hospital.

The San Matteo Hospital Museum became a University fixture in the second half of the XIX century but remained on hospital grounds until the 1930s. It was then integrated to the newly inaugurated Pavia University History Museum, following the move of the Hospital to new facilities.

The Porta Room displays experimental preparations (mostly regarding the circulatory system), didactical preparations (to illustrate peculiar types of surgical operations) and pathological preparations (to show how pathology may, in its advanced stages, profoundly modify an organ’s shape, structure and anatomical relationships).

Anatomy books displayed in the Porta Room