IT TAKES ABOUT TWO MINUTES, and fewer than 200 paces, to walk from the Pitti Palace to No 17 Via Romana. In that brief journey, the crowds of tourists disappear, the shops start selling things that real people need, and the cafés and hotels give way to workshops and apartments. No 17 is part of the University of Florence, and hidden within it is one of the city’s least visited gems: the museum known as La Specola. I first went there after a tip-off from a friend, and soon after I arrived, panting, at the top of the staircase, I knew that La Specola was bound to feature in one of my Montmorency books.

At first it just looks old-fashioned. The sort of museum that lottery money is eradicating from Britain: full of ancient wooden display cases. Opened to the public in 1775, it was founded on the natural history collection started long before by the Medici, and grew through the 19th century into one of the world’s finest displays of specimens in glass jars, of stuffed animals, birds, crustaceans, reptiles and fish. Turn round, and you’re facing a rhinoceros, an ostrich, or a giant turtle glowing under several layers of thick, dark varnish.

Years of cash shortages have led to damp patches on the ceiling, the installation of harsh overhead lighting and the fading of ancient handwritten labels; but essentially this is the place to which Montmorency comes in 1898 with Lord George Fox-Selwyn and his nephew Frank in Montmorency and the Assassins. They are on the trail of stolen exhibits from a collection in London. Like me on my first visit, they’re in for a wonderful surprise.

“Then, emerging from the sharks, Frank let out a cry that brought the others running. He had chanced upon the first of a series of rooms showing quite different exhibits. Elegant glass cases housed human beings, naked and cut open to reveal their insides in intricate detail. The bodies pulsed with raw colour, the flesh a damp, sweaty pink, the muscles bloody red and the fat a glutinous yellowy-orange, almost dripping from the raw incisions. From the throat of one corpse, delicate networks of arteries and veins were teased out across the pillow where the skinned head lay, as if asleep. The three men stood, horrified, imagining for a moment that these effigies might be real. Then Montmorency looked at the sign and consulted his dictionary. Cere anatomiche. They were waxworks.”

The shock is extraordinary. The sheer quantity of these beautiful models overwhelms you. The museum has more than 1,000, most of them on display. In addition to the full-size bodies there are detailed explorations of individual organs, of heads, torsos, even cross-sections of babies in the womb. Each exhibit is an object of beauty in its own right, the work of 18th and early 19th-century artists schooled in the same traditions of Florentine craftsmanship that made the city’s churches some of the wonders of the world. So around an explosion of intestines a figure of pure serenity sleeps like the effigy of a marble saint. But the models were commissioned for a practical purpose. The sculptors worked in collaboration with anatomists to produce accurate reference tools for medical students, thereby keeping the dissection of real human cadavers to a minimum.

Each of the exhibits is accompanied by watercolour diagrams, intricately inscribed and labelled, detailing the body parts and their functions. After years of attack by light and insects, these are now displayed in facsimile form, but back in their fragile wooden frames, and still in the old configuration: hard up against each other, completely covering the wall space in some of the rooms. Restoring them to their original positions after copying was an inspired act by curators under pressure from some public opinion to modernise, even if the decision was helped, or possibly even determined, by lack of funds.

We need places such as La Specola. The history of how people learnt matters if we are to understand that learning itself. And as more museums install interactive electronic media, acres of pastel backdrops and didactic displays, it’s a joy to find one that hasn’t changed. Even the floor tells a story. This, possibly the first free public museum, is paved with terracotta tiles, originally sealed with red paint. Over the years visitors’ feet have worn the paint away, showing exactly where people have stopped and stared. The huge shark is obviously a favourite, but by far the biggest hit has long been the display of wax models of female genitalia alongside the voluptuous form of a naked Venus complete with flowing hair, pearl necklace and trim fingernails.

Taken behind the scenes, high up in the building, I stood in the dilapidated remains of the 18th-century observatory from which the museum takes its name. Surrounded by the crumbling forms of fantastic stone beasts that support the roof, I was allowed to hold the lifesize model of a newborn baby. It should have been repellent. The skin was slit and peeled back to expose the liver and digestive tract, and the head was convincingly coated with soft hair apparently still moist and matted with the fluids of childbirth. Yet the face was so delicate, the chubby limbs so peacefully relaxed, that it was impossible not to cradle him like a real child.

For Montmorency and his friends, rattling across Europe at the end of the 19th century, La Specola becomes the scene of unexpected drama and danger. That’s fiction, of course. I dream that one day people will visit to see where those events are set. But for now, especially outside term time, when the Italian school parties stop, there is often a mere trickle of visitors at La Specola. What a shame that many of the tired tourists roasting in the queues round the Duomo and the Uffizi don ’t even know that it’s there.

MONTMORENCY AND THE ASSASSINS
by Eleanor Updale
Scholastic Press, £12.99; 288pp
£11.69 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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