Physics Museum

The Physics Museum of Sapienza occupies the first and third floors of the Fermi Building, inside the Department of Physics in the University City, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome. Admission is free and there is no ticket, but the door is not always open: an independent visit is possible only in the time slots that the museum's published calendar marks as LIBERO (free access), and the guided visit must be booked by writing to the management at direzionemuseo.fisica@uniroma1.it, indicating the chosen slot. Whoever arrives without having arranged anything risks finding the rooms closed. You get there by metro B, Policlinico stop. From Termini the surface lines 310 and 492 leave, and on foot it is about 20 minutes. There is no bookshop, cloakroom or cafeteria: it is a university museum inside a department that works, and the cafes are all outside, on the sides of the campus.

If you are looking for other free admissions in the city, the page dedicated to free museums in Rome collects the recurring opportunities. The Physics Museum belongs to yet another category, that of university museums, free by vocation and not by calendar.

Where the Physics Museum is and how you really get there

The University City is a closed urban rectangle, with several gates, and the Physics Museum is in the part of the campus dedicated to the hard sciences. The address the museum publishes is that of the university, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5. Once inside, the Fermi Building is the wing of the Department of Physics: the museum rooms are on the first and third floors, and this detail matters more than it seems, because it means going up and down, and means that the route is not a continuous loop but two sections separated by a flight of stairs or an elevator.

The museum also gives its coordinates in what3words, agganci.leone.sterzi, which for once are more useful than usual: inside a campus with 10 buildings in a row, a three-word pointer solves in 30 seconds what a generic map leaves unresolved for a quarter of an hour.

Public transport and useful stops

The useful metro B stop is Policlinico. From there you follow the university wall and enter by one of the gates on Viale Regina Elena side. From Termini, as an alternative to the metro, the university indicates the surface lines 310 and 492, or a walk of about 20 minutes that crosses the Castro Pretorio neighborhood. If there are two or three of you and you have the schedule in your pocket, walk. The bus at that time of day is a lottery and the time gained is nil.

The neighborhood around the Physics Museum

The campus borders San Lorenzo on one side and the Policlinico Umberto I on the other. That means that, on leaving, you have two opposite worlds within a footstep: the working class and student grid of San Lorenzo, with the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura and the Verano Cemetery, and the large hospital front of Viale del Policlinico. For lunch, San Lorenzo. No contest.

What the Sapienza Physics Museum is, and what it is not

The Physics Museum preserves the instruments used in the teaching and research of the physical sciences in Rome from the late 1700s to the 1960s. It's not a collection of mute relics: it is the toolkit of a trade, the material with which physics was taught and practiced in Rome for two and a half centuries. The specimens on display are about 600, and most belong to the 1870-1930 bracket, that is the years in which Italian experimental physics moves from the lecture-desk demonstration to real research.

A clarification worth making right away, because the two names are constantly confused. The Sapienza Physics Museum is not the Fermi Center on Via Panisperna. The latter is called in full the Enrico Fermi Historical Museum of Physics and Study and Research Center, acronym CREF, and is an autonomous public research body based at Via Panisperna 89 A with guest entrance from Piazza del Viminale 1. They are two distinct institutions, with two distinct managements and two distinct ways of visiting, united by the fact that both preserve Fermi's memory. If you want the historic site on Via Panisperna, the one where the group worked, the reference page is that of the Enrico Fermi Center. If you want the instruments the group worked with, you're in the right place here, at Sapienza.

Who runs the Physics Museum today

The management of the museum is entrusted to Professor Adele La Rana. The Museum Council includes the director of the Department of Physics, Daniele Del Re, and Professors Maria Grazia Betti, Sergio Caprara, Claudia Fasolato and Giovanni Organtini, with Giovanni Battimelli and Miriam Focaccia as experts designated by the Enrico Fermi Research Center. The curatorship of the museum area is by Dr. Darica Paradiso. These are names that tell a tourist little and tell whoever is booking everything: the single channel is the management, and email works better than the phone.

The collections of the Physics Museum, section by section

The museum organizes its holdings into seven collections: mechanics, air pumps, acoustics, electricity and magnetism, optics, spectroscopy, the Fermi Collection. It's not a bureaucratic taxonomy: it is the mental map with which 19th century physics divided up the world, and going through it in order means crossing two centuries of ideas about what a natural phenomenon was and how it had to be forced to show itself.

Mechanics at the Physics Museum

Until the mid-19th century, experiments in mechanics, together with those in electricity, were the backbone of demonstration lectures. The figure that makes it concrete is in the 1828 register: of just over 300 instruments listed, about 80 concerned mechanics, with ballistics and hydrostatics as corollaries. The recurring themes were always the same and still work as an index of a course: laws of equilibrium and motion of solids, acceleration of falling bodies in free fall and on inclined planes, composition of motions and forces, central forces and Kepler's laws, oscillations of pendulums. Collisions and energy considerations come later, in the second half of the century, when the idea of energy becomes the center of the discourse.

In the display cases you find a large brass hydrostatic balance by Felice Morelli, dated 1816, a precision balance by A. Scateni of Urbino, and then the sequence of the great European makers: Rueprecht of Vienna, Gambey of Paris, Officine Galileo of Florence. There is Righi's double pendulum for the composition of harmonic motions, a compensation pendulum clock, an electrodynamic clock, the Atwood machine already recorded in the 1828 catalog, the Morin machine from the following years, a length comparator from the late 1800s and two dividing engines from the 1920s.

If I had to point to a single object to look at for a long time in this section, I'd choose the Atwood machine. It's a frame with a pulley, a string and two masses, and it served to slow free fall down until it could be measured with a pendulum. 200 years before the optical sensor, someone solved the problem of too short a time with an idea instead of a device. It's worth more than half a room of shiny apparatus.

The standard units: Gambey's meter and liter at the Physics Museum

The most surprising part of the mechanics section is the standard units, and here the Physics Museum has something very few Italian museums can show. The major piece is the standard meter by Henri Prudence Gambey, a Parisian maker who lived between 1789 and 1847. It is a brass specimen, engraved with the formula of its own thermal expansion: Mètre, Dilatation du métal pour un degré centigrade 0m000019129. It has marks at every centimeter along the whole length and at every millimeter over the first 10 centimeters. In the wooden case, which measures 124 by 21 by 2.5 centimeters, is kept the certificate of conformity attesting its identity with the platinum meter under the law of April 7, 1795. It comes from the Sapienza Physics Theater and dates to about 1820: in the inventory register it appears in Section I at number 2.

Next to it are three one-meter brass bars, two of them silver-plated, with divisions to the millimeter and the last mark, at both ends, subdivided into five parts: they served to calibrate other meters with the comparator and the dividing engine. They come from the Volpicelli collection. A further specimen bears the stamp NAK 1887 and is registered as I-2 ter, and yet another, with no marks, as I-2 bis.

Then there is Gambey's standard liter, which is a small masterpiece of practical intelligence: a brass cylinder varnished with gilded brasolina, closed at the top by a disc of frosted glass, with overall dimensions of 11 by 11 by 20 centimeters, also from the Volpicelli collection and registered in Section I at number 13. It was filled to the brim, then the free surface was pressed with the glass disc to eliminate the excess due to surface tension. The result was exactly one liter. Anyone who has ever tried to measure a volume with a meniscus understands the genius of the solution at once. The scientific description of this section is signed by M. Grazia Ianniello, who worked on the museum's holdings for years.

Air pumps and the race for the vacuum

Until the early 19th century pneumatics was considered an integral part of mechanics, both in its theoretical and its construction aspects. In the course of the century its themes are absorbed first into the science of heat and then into thermodynamics, while vacuum technique takes a path all its own, tied to research on electrical conduction in gases and, from the 20th century, to electronics. From there descend electric lighting and radio broadcasting, down to the 1950s and electron tubes.

The sequence on display at the Physics Museum is a lesson in the history of technology in eight objects: the Hauksbee two-cylinder pump, a two-cylinder glass compression pump, a pneumatic bell jar with pressure gauge, the Golaz single-cylinder pump, the Geryk two-cylinder pump with oil-sealed piston, the Gaede rotary oil pump, the Gaede rotary mercury pump and the Leybold oil diffusion pump. The description of this section is by Daniele Rebuzzi.

Look at them in a row, from left to right, and you will have before your eyes the race toward an ever deeper vacuum that made possible the light bulb, the thermionic valve, the cathode ray tube and finally television. A row of brass pumps explains the 20th century better than a textbook chapter.

Acoustics at the Physics Museum: Blaserna, Koenig and the Office of the Tuning Fork

The acoustics collection is the museum's least advertised pride. It gathers instruments and apparatus of the second half of the 19th century coming from the Royal Physics Institute on Via Panisperna, and it was formed in three clearly recognizable waves: a first order in 1873, right after the establishment of the Practical School of Physics, an expansion in 1887, with the creation of the Central Office of the Uniform Tuning Fork, and an acquisition between 1921 and 1926 from the physics cabinet of the Magistero of Rome.

The name that recurs is that of Rudolf Koenig, who lived between 1832 and 1901, the most prestigious designer and maker of acoustics instruments of the second half of the 19th century. A student of von Helmholtz, he moved to Paris in 1851 and in 1858 started his independent business. His 1882 catalog counts 262 items. The tuning forks, harmonic analyzers and manometric capsules that Koenig built were objects of optical precision applied to sound, and even today they have an elegance that no electronic instrument reaches.

The decisive figure, though, is Pietro Blaserna, who lived between 1836 and 1918, called to Rome in 1872 to the chair of experimental physics. Before him, the vibrational phenomena tied to sound were treated dismissively: too specialized for general courses, and neglected experimentally because they were considered of little significance. A perfect vicious circle had formed, the kind that blocks a discipline for decades: inadequate instrumentation makes the phenomenon uninteresting, and an uninteresting phenomenon induces no one to obtain better instrumentation. Blaserna, personally passionate about music and aware from direct experience of what the new acoustic instrumentation could do even in general physics, broke the circle by buying real instruments. In 1887, at the Royal Physics Institute, the Central Office of the Uniform Tuning Fork was born, that is the body that was to fix by law the reference A for the whole of musical Italy.

It's the most beautiful story in the entire museum: a newly unified State that, among a thousand urgencies, decides that the pitch of musical instruments too is a unit of measurement and must be regulated like the meter and the kilogram.

Electricity and magnetism at the Physics Museum

The electrical section divides into two families: friction machines, present especially from 1820 on, and induction machines, which cover from the second half of the 19th century to 1930. The former all descend from the 1663 prototype, when Otto von Guericke, who lived between 1602 and 1686, built the first device able to produce electric virtue: a sulfur globe that rotated, hand-operated, and that the operator touched with the palm.

At the museum you can recognize specimens inspired by the models of Francis Hauksbee, 1666-1713, and Jean Antoine Nollet, 1700-1770, and a Nairne machine, designed in 1773 by Edward Nairne, 1726-1806, English mechanic, for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Then there are variants of the Ramsden and Winter machines. Friction machines, with the Leyden jar, played a fundamental role in the history of electricity until the mid-19th century: they were the only way to accumulate charge in appreciable quantity.

Induction machines work on a different, multiplicative principle: the charge is amplified by repeated induction. The collection includes the Holtz prototype, the Wimshurst machine with automatic priming and the motor-driven Wommelsdorf machines. Until the early 1930s they were the simplest means of obtaining high continuous potentials, on the order of 100,000 volts. A fact to keep in mind when you arrive at the Fermi Collection: the 1936 accelerator comes from this tradition, not from another planet.

Optics at the Physics Museum

The 19th century is the century that reopens the game on the nature of light, and the optics section of the Physics Museum documents it piece by piece. Interference and diffraction enter science with Thomas Young in 1802 and with Jean Fresnel around 1815. Polarization has an older prehistory: the double refraction of calcite had been observed by Erasmus Bartholinus in 1669, but it is the research of Etienne Louis Malus between 1808 and 1810 that establishes the properties of light polarized by reflection and by double refraction. After him come Arago, Brewster and Biot.

Among the Italians the name that counts is Macedonio Melloni, who demonstrated the identity between luminous radiation and radiant heat: the museum preserves the Melloni optical bench, which was the theater of that demonstration. Many of the instruments on display come from the Parisian firm Soleil-Duboscq, later Ph. Pellin, which for half a century was the obligatory supplier of every physics cabinet in Europe: from it comes, among other things, the Jamin interferometer. The section is completed by polarimeters of different types, among them a tourmaline tongs attributed to Biot, a Silbermann heliostat and a projection lantern. The scientific description is signed by Silvia Trapanese.

The tourmaline tongs deserve a stop: two crystals mounted on a jeweler's clamp, and with those polarization was demonstrated to a whole class. The attribution to Biot is to be taken for what it is, a reasoned attribution and not a signed document, but the object in itself is one of the most eloquent of the entire route.

Spectroscopy at the Physics Museum

Spectroscopy is the discipline that turned light into a chemical identity document, and the dedicated section tells it in chronological order. The first observation on the decomposition of sunlight through a prism is tied to the name of Newton and dates to about 1670. In 1802 William Hyde Wollaston notices black lines in the solar spectrum while studying dispersion in glass, but doesn't understand what they are. The correct interpretation comes in 1814 with Joseph von Fraunhofer, who links the dark lines of the solar spectrum to the bright lines of sodium. Around 1800 and 1801 the invisible radiations are added: beyond the red with Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel, beyond the violet with Johann Wilhelm Ritter. In 1827 John Frederick Herschel puts forward the hypothesis that the dark lines in the spectra of the Sun and the stars are due to the absorption of light, and it is the keystone of all later astrophysics.

The instruments on display follow the same line: a Bunsen spectroscope by Kruess, a six-prism spectroscope, and then the instruments based on the diffraction grating of Friedrich Adolph Nobert, perfected by Henry Augustus Rowland with concave metal surfaces. This section too is signed by Silvia Trapanese.

The leap to understand is the one from the prism to the grating: the prism separates colors by exploiting a material, the grating separates them by exploiting geometry. The second path is more precise and more reproducible, and it won. If you look at a Rowland grating against grazing light and see the iridescence, you have in front of you the reason why today we know what a star is made of.

The Fermi Collection at the Physics Museum

This is the reason many visitors pass through the gate, and it lives up to expectations. The Fermi Collection documents two seasons of research of the Roman group: atomic spectroscopy between 1927 and 1931, and nuclear physics between 1934 and 1936.

Of the first season remain the two large Hilger Littrow spectrographs that at the institute were called the crocodiles, for their elongated shape and the mouth of the plate holder: one of 3 meters for the visible, one of a meter and a half for the ultraviolet. Together with them are kept the photographic plates of the spectra from the main experiments, which are the raw data the group worked on.

Of the second season remains the equipment of early nuclear physics: ionization chambers, Geiger-Müller counters of different sizes, two Wilson chambers, a trochoidal electromagnet, an electrostatic voltmeter called butterfly, and the radon-beryllium neutron source in sealed glass tubes. There are also the containers with the materials used for irradiation, silver and other metals reduced to powder, housed in non-activatable sheaths. It is the part that impresses most anyone who has an idea of what it means today to handle radioactive material: glass tubes, sheaths, and hands.

Two pieces must be sought out carefully. The first is the 1936 electrostatic accelerator, the first Italian accelerating machine, whose rectifier valve the museum also preserves. The second is the small model of the apparatus of the 1945 experiment by Conversi, Pancini and Piccioni, with two of the magnetic lenses used: that experiment showed that the particle observed in cosmic rays was not the meson predicted by Yukawa, and in effect opened postwar particle physics. It was carried out in makeshift conditions, in a Rome just out of the war.

The ministry, in its own entry dedicated to the museum, also lists among the notable pieces the mechanical calculator used by Enrico Fermi. If it's in the display case when you go, look at it: it's the object that makes everything else human.

From the Physics Theater of 1748 to the Physics Museum of today

The Physics Museum was not born in the 20th century. It was born in the mid-18th century, inside a pontifical university, and its history coincides with the history of physics teaching in Rome. Telling it in full is the best way to understand why those display cases contain what they contain.

The Studium Urbis and the Palazzo della Sapienza

The University of Rome was founded in 1303 by Boniface VIII with the bull In Supremae. Before then higher education in the city was reserved to the clergy, through the Lateran chapter school and the Universitas Romanae Curiae. The municipal Studio was based at the church of Sant'Eustachio and included all the faculties, with a clear prevalence of legal studies. In 1376 it was moved to Trastevere. In 1431 Eugene IV ordered the construction of colleges for poor students and established a council of reformers, and the Studio returned to Sant'Eustachio. With Nicholas V, between 1447 and 1455, Latin and Greek letters were reborn. With Paul III Farnese, at the beginning of the 1600s, the university opened to lay culture.

The Palazzo della Sapienza was solemnly inaugurated in 1660 under Alexander VII, and in 1670 the Alessandrina Library opened to the public. Anyone who wanted to see that palace today finds it on Corso del Rinascimento, with the spiral dome that makes it unrepeatable: the page on the church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza tells of the building that for two centuries also housed the physics cabinet of which today's museum is the direct heir.

The Physics Theater of 1748 and the first catalog

The original core of the Physics Museum has a date and a document. Benedict XIV, pontiff from 1740 to 1758 and radical reformer of university teaching, established the Physics Theater of the Sapienza with a chirograph of October 14, 1748. In 1751 the Physics Cabinet was already set up on the upper floor of the Sapienza and open for public demonstrations two Saturdays a month. Take a second to appreciate this: science outreach on a fixed calendar, in Rome, in 1751.

Under Pius VI, from 1775 to 1799, the chair of physics was held from 1792 by Bartolomeo Gandolfi, 1735-1824. In 1794 the first catalog of the machines was compiled, the document that still allows the oldest pieces to be dated today. Under Pius VII, from 1800 to 1823, the chair of Sacred Physics was born in 1816, entrusted to Abbot Feliciano Scarpellini, who put together his own Physics Cabinet later ceded to the university. The 1828 catalog photographs the holdings reached, increased by the work of Saverio Barlocci, author of a manual of Experimental Physics.

The new Physics Museum of 1857 and Paolo Volpicelli

Paolo Volpicelli, 1804-1879, became a professor in 1845 and director of the Physics Cabinet from 1847. Under his management the collections grew significantly and those of the Marquis Origo and of Scarpellini flowed into them. Volpicelli was also the first to carry out regular observations of atmospheric electricity in Rome, and he carried them out right in the university's physics museum.

In 1857, by the will of Pius IX, the new Physics Museum was set up in the entire wing of the top floor of the Palazzo della Sapienza, built according to the most modern devices of the time: natural light from above, a laboratory with running water, a meteorology room with a terrace, an amphitheater convertible into a dark room, with a wooden floor and steps independent of the structure to avoid vibrations. Among the main instruments were the Atwood machine, a hydraulic press, a metric balance sensitive to the weight of a grain, a lathe built by Giuseppe Bermanni, a compensation pendulum clock, an electrodynamic clock, solar microscopes, parabolic burning mirrors and the complete Melloni apparatus. The direction was Volpicelli's, assisted by the machinist Giacomo Luswergh.

Blaserna, Via Panisperna and the Practical School of Physics

In 1872 Pietro Blaserna was called to direct the Royal Physics Institute and the teaching was split in two: experimental physics to him, mathematical physics to Volpicelli. In 1880 the Institute moved to the new building on Via Panisperna, designed by Blaserna himself, with spaces for teaching, research and services that were state of the art in Italy. The basement floor housed the plant for producing direct current by means of a water fall. On the ground floor were the Amphitheater for lectures, the Small School, the practical laboratories and the machine shop. On the first floor were the management, the library, the Cabinet for precision instruments and other laboratories.

Among Blaserna's assistants are Damiano Macaluso, 1873-76, Filippo Keller, 1876-81, Giuseppe Folgheraiter, 1881-1913, Guglielmo Mengarini, 1881-88, Alfonso Sella, 1891-1900, Domenico Pacini, 1903-05, and Umberto Cialdea, 1909-21. Among the technical staff appear Lodovico Meda and above all Augusto Zanchi, 1882-1936, and his son Lodovico Zanchi, 1904-1976: the latter, in the institute's archives, is described as Blaserna's shadow. These are the names who built, repaired and calibrated many of the instruments you see in the display cases today, and whom no plaque ever celebrates enough.

The Physics Circle of Rome, 1891

Blaserna established the Physics Circle of Rome in 1891, with its first meeting on January 5 of that year, to promote the spread of science through lectures, discussions and reports. He was its honorary president. The honorary vice presidents were Pisati and Keller, the first replaced by Eugenio Beltrami in November 1891. The secretary was Dr. Pierpaoli. Among the members are Guglielmo Mengarini, Alfonso Sella, Moisè Ascoli and, from 1894, Quirino Maiorana.

Between 1891 and 1897 the weekly lectures touched on electricity and electrical engineering, seismology, gravimetry, the Hall effect, ultraviolet rays, alternating currents, the Peltier effect, gravity, electric motors, thermodynamics, magnetic inclination, rotating fields. In 1897 Blaserna announced the formation of a committee to found the Italian Physical Society. Between 1896 and 1899 the Circle organized public lectures for a fee that took in 3,394 lire, with titles that say it all about the era: After Roentgen's Discovery, given by Maiorana, and Wireless Electrical Transmissions, given by Ascoli. The city paid for a ticket to hear about X-rays a year after their discovery.

Corbino, Fermi and the boys of Via Panisperna

From 1918 to 1937 the Institute was directed by Orso Mario Corbino, who steered research toward electrical engineering, electronics and spectroscopy. In 1926 Corbino established the first chair of Theoretical Physics in Italy and called Enrico Fermi to it. Around Fermi formed the group that the world knows as the boys of Via Panisperna: Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo. Among the collaborators are also Ettore Majorana, Giulio Racah and Ugo Fano.

In 1934 Fermi, with Amaldi, Rasetti and Segrè, discovered artificial radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment. In October of the same year the group discovered the moderating effect of hydrogenated substances, paraffin above all: the slowed neutrons turned out to be much more effective than fast ones. It is the discovery that earned the 1938 Nobel and that opens the way to reactor physics.

1937, the dispersal and the recovery of 1978

1937 is the year of the rupture. The Institute moved to the newly built University City, Corbino died, and the following year Fermi left Italy right after the Nobel, pushed by the racial laws. Segrè, Rasetti and Pontecorvo emigrated in the same years. The instrumentation no longer in use was piled up in the basements, with serious losses due to the disposal of materials and the cannibalization of parts, especially during the war years. Much of what is not in the display cases today ended up in a crate back then.

The recovery dates from 1978: on the occasion of Edoardo Amaldi's 70th birthday, the salvaged instrumentation was taken up again and set up in two rooms of the new Department of Physics building. The layout was overseen by Professor Giovanni Battimelli with the collaboration of Professor Maria Grazia Ianniello. From 2014 the direction was taken on by Professor Giovanni Organtini, and today the museum is directed by Professor Adele La Rana. The museum also preserves the catalogs and the invoice registers from 1872 on, which are the primary source for dating and attributing every single piece.

The Marconi Building, the Fermi Building and the architecture of the University City

The Physics Museum is in the Fermi Building, but the building history of Roman physics on campus begins with the Marconi Building, which the museum documents in a dedicated section. Designed by Giuseppe Pagano, one of the decisive figures of modern Italian architecture, it is part of the University City complex inaugurated in 1935. It has a volume of 72,500 cubic meters and a surface of 3,400 square meters, and was conceived in two distinct sections, one for Higher Physics and one for Experimental Physics. The masonry structure is clad in lithoceramic. The rooms number 237 in all, of which 20 are large, bright laboratories. The building occupies a corner position on Piazzale della Minerva, along the main axis of the campus.

The decorations are by Corrado Vigni: the sculptural group at the center of the inner courtyard and the bas-reliefs with scenes of animals fighting on the balustrade of the outer staircase. They are details almost nobody looks at, because whoever arrives on campus looks down, at the phone, or ahead, at the classroom. Look up: that balustrade is one of the most curious pieces of 1930s sculpture in Rome, and it survives amid a coming and going of students who brush past it every day without seeing it.

For the rest of the University City it's worth remembering that the complex was completed between 1932 and 1935, and that it houses other museums you can visit: the Sapienza Gipsoteca and the Contemporary Art Laboratory Museum are the two easiest to combine with a morning at the Physics Museum.

A curiosity about the Physics Museum

The strongest curiosity of the Physics Museum is not about Fermi. It is about the A. In 1887, at the Royal Physics Institute on Via Panisperna, the Central Office of the Uniform Tuning Fork was established, and the museum preserves the instrumentation that descends from it. The corista, in 19th century vocabulary, is the reference tuning fork: the exact pitch to which the musical instruments of a country are tuned. Until the mid-19th century every orchestra, every theater, often every city, had its own pitch. An oboe tuned in Milan was out of tune in Naples. For a newly unified Italy, with a music industry that was one of the few really strong voices of cultural export, the matter was not folklore: it was a question of measurement, of trade and of identity.

That it was a physics institute and not a conservatory that took care of it says everything about how the 19th century understood science: a tuning fork is an object that vibrates at a frequency, and a frequency is measured like a length. Blaserna, who was a physicist with a real musical ear, made it the pretext to equip the institute with a top-level acoustic collection, buying from the best makers in Europe. The paradox is that a decision made to regulate the tuning of musical instruments produced, a century and a half later, one of the soundest collections of 19th century acoustic apparatus in Italy, preserved today at the Physics Museum.

A clear piece of advice: if you have only one hour and you are convinced you're coming for the Hilger crocodiles, change your program and have the acoustics display case explained to you. You've seen Geiger counters in 10 documentaries. A Koenig harmonic analyzer, with its manometric capsules and its little flames, you have never seen, and you won't see it elsewhere in the city.

Something nobody tells you about the Physics Museum

That the museum is spread over two non-adjacent floors. The rooms are on the first and third floors of the Fermi Building, and this is the practical reason why a visit to the Physics Museum doesn't work like a visit to a civic museum. There is no set route with arrows on the floor. There are two sections of exhibition inside a university department that in the meantime holds classes, research and exams. Between the first and third floors you walk past laboratory doors, notice boards with exam dates and students reviewing in the hallway.

The second thing that isn't said is the most important of all: the museum doesn't have fixed museum hours. Admission is free, but the independent visit is possible only in the intervals that the museum's calendar marks as LIBERO (free access), and for the guided visit you choose an available slot in that calendar and confirm it by email with the management. It's worth insisting, because it's the point on which almost all wasted trips are made: it is not a museum that opens every day from 9 to 7. It is a university museum that opens when the department can guarantee a presence.

Third thing, and it's for whoever organizes. There are no ancillary services: no bookshop, no cafeteria, no equipped baggage storage. The museum states it openly and adds that in the surroundings the places for refreshment are many, which is true: San Lorenzo is five minutes away. If you arrive with a group, sort out backpacks and coats beforehand, because in a department hallway there is nobody to leave them with.

I add a professional note: precisely because the museum works by reservation, the quality of the guided visit is high. Whoever accompanies you in the rooms of the Physics Museum is usually someone who has studied or used those instruments, not an operator hired by the piece. It's a difference you feel after three minutes.

The advice I give you for visiting the Physics Museum

Write to the management before booking the rest of the day, not after. The correct sequence is this: open the calendar of guided visits published by the museum, find a slot marked LIBERO, send an email to direzionemuseo.fisica@uniroma1.it indicating day, time slot and number of people, and wait for the confirmation with the operating instructions. Only at that point build the rest around it: lunch in San Lorenzo, the afternoon at the Verano or at the MACRO, the second university museum.

Second tip, on the number of people. The rooms are not big and the route runs over two floors: a group of 10 or 12 people works, a group of 30 splits up and can't hear. If you are a party, ask explicitly when booking if it is possible to divide into two shifts. Better two orderly half hours than an hour of single file in the hallway.

Third tip, on when. The university calendar rules. In exam session weeks the department is in full activity and availability shrinks. In August the University City empties out and finding a slot is harder, not easier, because the staff is on vacation. The best windows, from experience, are the second half of October and the months of March and April, when the academic year is running at full pace but not yet in emergency.

Fourth and last: ask, when booking, if both floors will be accessible during your visit. Availability can vary, and knowing in advance if you'll see only part of the route lets you decide if you want to postpone to a better date. The Physics Museum is not a place you come back to by chance while passing: if you go, you might as well see all of it.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

That Enrico Fermi won the Nobel in 1938 and left Italy right after, everybody knows. What almost nobody connects is the material consequence of that departure on the objects you see in the display cases today. In 1937 the Institute left Via Panisperna for the University City. Corbino, who had been that group's political and academic protector, died the same year. Fermi left in 1938. Segrè, Rasetti and Pontecorvo went away within a very short time. The group dissolved in 24 months.

The instruments left, no longer used by anybody, were piled up in the basements of the new building. There happened what always happens in these cases, and which the museum's archives record without pitying euphemisms: disposal of materials judged cumbersome and cannibalization of parts, that is pieces taken off one apparatus to repair another. The war years did the rest. What is today called the Fermi Collection is not the equipment of Via Panisperna group: it is what survived of it.

The rescue has a date and an emotional motive: 1978, the 70th birthday of Edoardo Amaldi, the only one of the four who stayed in Italy all his life. On that occasion the recovered instrumentation was brought out of the storerooms and displayed in two rooms. The museum you visit today is born, technically, from a birthday present.

Said without indulgence: it is a fact that should be told on every panel. Not to make rhetoric about the dispersal, but because it changes how you look at a display case. Those Geiger counters are not there because someone preserved them carefully for 40 years. They are there because someone, in 1978, went down to the cellar.

The right photo to take at the Physics Museum

The Hilger Littrow spectrographs, the two crocodiles, shot lengthwise. They are the only subject in the museum that holds up to photography naturally, because they have a length that throws you: 3 meters the first, a meter and a half the second. Stand at one end, lower the shooting point to the height of the body of the instrument and let perspective do the work. The result tells in one image what 20 lines of caption don't say: that in the spectroscopy of the 1920s precision was bought by the meter.

If you prefer something more graphic, the second choice is an induction machine, the Wimshurst or one of the Wommelsdorf: parallel discs, metal sectors, brushes and discharge spheres. Frame it three-quarter view with the side light from the window, and don't use frontal flash: on polished brass it bounces back and burns all the detail. If the room is dark, rest your elbow on the doorframe and use a slower shutter speed. A tripod in a department hallway is clutter and bad manners.

Third option, the hardest and the most beautiful: the photographic plates of the spectra. They are glass rectangles with dark and light streaks, and in a direct photograph they look like nothing. But if you find a way to shoot them backlit against a diffuse source, those lines become readable, and you are photographing the original experimental data, not a reproduction of it. Always ask before bringing a plate close to a light source, and don't touch it.

General rule, valid in all university museums: the display cases have untreated glass and reflect like mirrors. Bring the lens close to the glass until it almost touches, with your free hand shade the reflection, and shoot. Ask the staff accompanying you anyway if there are restrictions: when in doubt, the answer is a meter from you, and asking is quicker than regretting.

Some important events that happened here in history

The first event is administrative and founding at once: the chirograph of October 14, 1748 with which Benedict XIV established the Physics Theater of the Sapienza. Everything descends from that document, including the 18th century machines that open the route today. Three years later, in 1751, the Physics Cabinet was already set up on the upper floor of the Sapienza and opened for public demonstrations two Saturdays a month: it is perhaps the first stable form of science outreach to an open public documented in Rome.

The second event is 1857, when Pius IX wanted the new Physics Museum in the last wing of the Palazzo della Sapienza. The project provided for zenithal light, running water in the laboratory, a meteorological room with a terrace and an amphitheater convertible into a dark room with wooden tiers decoupled from the structure. In 1857, in Rome, inside a Papal State a few years from its end, someone was designing a scientific museum thinking about stray vibrations.

The third is 1880, with the transfer of the Royal Physics Institute to the new building on Via Panisperna designed by Blaserna. It was the best equipped physics institute in Italy: direct current produced in the basement by falling water, an amphitheater, an in-house machine shop, a cabinet for precision instruments. Many of the museum's objects come physically from those rooms.

The fourth is the sequence of 1934. In that year Fermi, Amaldi, Rasetti and Segrè discovered artificial radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment. In October of the same year came the discovery of the moderating effect of hydrogenated substances. It is the moment when Italian physics enters world history, and the radon-beryllium tubes in sealed glass preserved at the Physics Museum are the material residue of those days.

The fifth is 1936, with the construction of the first Italian electrostatic accelerator, of which the museum preserves the apparatus and the rectifier valve. The sixth is 1945, with the experiment by Conversi, Pancini and Piccioni, whose small model and magnetic lenses are in the collection: it was the demonstration that the cosmic ray meson was not the particle predicted by Yukawa's theory, and modern particle physics was born from there. The seventh, finally, is 1978, the year of the recovery and of the first exhibition to the public in the two rooms of the Department.

It's worth adding a minor and fascinating event: between 1896 and 1899 the Physics Circle of Rome, founded by Blaserna in 1891, organized public lectures for a fee that brought in 3,394 lire, with titles like After Roentgen's Discovery and Wireless Electrical Transmissions. No press office, no festival: just curiosity, and a public willing to pay to satisfy it.

Who has passed through the Physics Museum

The list of illustrious passages through the Physics Museum and the institutions it descends from is denser than the museum itself advertises. It starts with the founders and directors: Bartolomeo Gandolfi, holder of the chair from 1792, Abbot Feliciano Scarpellini, who by bringing his private cabinet to the university in 1816 greatly increased its holdings, Saverio Barlocci, author of a manual of Experimental Physics and responsible for the growth documented by the 1828 catalog.

Then Paolo Volpicelli, 1804-1879, director from 1847, who gathered the collections of the Marquis Origo and of Scarpellini and made in Rome the first regular observations of atmospheric electricity. Beside him the machinist Giacomo Luswergh, a surname that in Rome also recalls photography, because the Luswerghs were one of the best known families of opticians and photographers of the 19th century city.

Pietro Blaserna, 1836-1918, is the central figure: he arrives in 1872, designs the building on Via Panisperna, establishes in 1887 the Central Office of the Uniform Tuning Fork and in 1891 the Physics Circle of Rome, and in 1897 sets in motion the committee from which the Italian Physical Society will be born. Around him passed Damiano Macaluso, Filippo Keller, Giuseppe Folgheraiter, Guglielmo Mengarini, Alfonso Sella, Domenico Pacini, one of the pioneers of cosmic ray research, and Umberto Cialdea. In the Physics Circle also appear Moisè Ascoli, Quirino Maiorana and Eugenio Beltrami, a first-rate mathematician.

With Orso Mario Corbino, director from 1918 to 1937, comes the generation everyone knows. Corbino establishes in 1926 the first chair of Theoretical Physics in Italy and calls Enrico Fermi to it. Around Fermi are formed Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Edoardo Amaldi and Bruno Pontecorvo, and through there pass Ettore Majorana, Giulio Racah and Ugo Fano. They are names that changed 20th century physics on four continents, and for a stretch of their lives they worked with these instruments.

Finally, the custodians. Augusto Zanchi, 1882-1936, and his son Lodovico, 1904-1976, technicians of the institute, the second described in the archives as Blaserna's shadow. Giovanni Battimelli and Maria Grazia Ianniello, who since 1978 have built the museum as it is visited today. Giovanni Organtini, director from 2014, and Adele La Rana, who directs it today. And to close the chapter: in a museum like this, the names of the technicians should be written as large as those of the Nobel laureates. Without Zanchi father and son, many of those apparatus would never have worked the first time.

The Physics Museum with children and with schools

It works, on one condition: that there is a guide. Left to himself, a kid in front of a brass display case gets bored in four minutes, because nothing moves and nothing lights up. With someone explaining why the Atwood machine served to slow the fall of a weight, or how 100,000 volts were produced by turning a crank, the same display case becomes a workshop of questions. For this reason, with children under 12, the booked guided visit is not a luxury: it is the condition of success.

The best age range, from experience, is between 11 and 16, that is when at school you meet the first names that appear here on a small plaque: Volta, Coulomb, Geiger, Fermi. Seeing a real Geiger counter, not the icon from a video game, has an effect that lasts. For primary schools the most effective section remains acoustics, because sound is the only phenomenon that can be told by ear.

If you are looking for a pairing that holds together a whole morning with kids, the University City offers other possibilities with a scientific bent: the Primo Levi Chemistry Museum, the University Earth Sciences Museum and the Battista Grassi Comparative Anatomy Museum, the latter the most spectacular of all for anyone under 10. Outside the campus, a short distance away, the Civic Zoology Museum and the Mathematics Museum complete the picture.

Accessibility, services and practical rules of the Physics Museum

The museum occupies the first and third floors of a university building. The Fermi Building has elevators, like all the buildings of the Department, but the specific access conditions for those who move in a wheelchair need to be agreed upon when booking: it's exactly the type of information the management gives when you confirm the time slot, and asking in advance avoids any surprise. Take nothing for granted in a building inside a campus from the 1930s.

On services the museum is explicit and honest: there is no bookshop or cafeteria, because it is a university museum and not a civic museum. There is no staffed cloakroom. There is no ticket office, for the simple reason that there is no ticket: entry is free. In the surroundings, as the museum itself points out, the places for refreshment are many, and indeed between Viale Regina Elena, San Lorenzo and Via Tiburtina you eat well and spend little.

A last piece of common sense advice, which in university museums matters more than elsewhere: watch where you put bags and backpacks. The hallways are service corridors, the doors next to them are active laboratories, and a 19th century apparatus on a table doesn't have the protection of an armored case. Whoever accompanies you will tell you where you can pass and where not. Listen to them.

How long the visit to the Physics Museum takes and how to organize it

With a guide, an hour and a quarter is the realistic length to see both floors without rushing. Alone, in a free slot, 40 minutes is enough to get an idea, but you will miss 80 percent of the meaning, because the apparatus doesn't have the narrative caption that the public of art museums is used to. Here the caption is a person.

If you have three hours on campus, the best way to spend them is this: the Physics Museum as the first stop, with a fresh mind, then a second university museum, then lunch outside. Don't do the opposite. Displays of scientific instruments demand attention, and attention at the Physics Museum is better spent at 10 in the morning than at 3 in the afternoon.

For those who come from outside Rome and have only one day, the professional advice is different and harder: the Physics Museum is not a first visit to Rome. It is a second or third visit, the one in which you look for the things that don't appear on the lists, and in that context it is worth a great deal. If it's your first time in the city and you have 48 hours, go elsewhere and come back to this museum next time, unhurried and with a reservation done properly.

When to go to the Physics Museum and when to avoid it

The rhythm of the museum is that of the university. The best periods are the full months of the academic year, when the department is alive and the availability in the calendar is more frequent: from mid-October to December, and from March to May. The difficult periods are August, when the campus empties, and the exam session weeks, when classrooms and staff are busy elsewhere.

There is an exception, though, worth keeping an eye on: the special openings. The museum takes part in the initiatives of the Sapienza Museum Hub, from the collective opening days of the university museums to the evenings of the Night of the Museums, and on those occasions the rooms open without the hassle of individual booking. The dates change from year to year and are announced on the museum's website in the news section: if you happen to be in Rome on one of those evenings, it's the best opportunity of all.

As for time of day, morning is better. The first and third floors of the Fermi Building have generous windows, and natural light on the brass of the instruments makes an enormous difference compared to the artificial lighting of a museum room. Go early, with the low light still coming in sideways, and the display cases change their face.

The Physics Museum and the other Sapienza museums

The Sapienza Museum Hub is one of the richest university museum systems in Europe, and the Physics Museum is one of its nodes. The curious thing is that almost no Roman has visited them all, and almost no tourist knows they exist. Within a 10 minute walk, inside the same campus, there are collections that in any other European city would be attractions marked on every map.

Anyone who wants to build a scientific itinerary has plenty to choose from: the Giuseppe Sergi Anthropology Museum, the History of Medicine Museum, the Herbarium Museum, the Museum of Art and Mineral Deposits and the Pathological Anatomy Museum, which is not for every stomach but is one of the most impressive places in the city. A short distance from the campus, the Botanical Garden remains the other great scientific institution of the Sapienza open to the public.

If instead you are looking for the natural completion of the Fermi story, the destination is the Enrico Fermi Center on Via Panisperna, which occupies the very building where the group worked: the instruments are here at the Sapienza, the rooms are there. Doing them on the same trip is the smartest thing you can do, and the two places are 20 minutes from each other. Whoever still has energy can add a quick stop at the Historical Museum of the Liberation on Via Tasso, which has more to do than it seems with the Rome of 1943 of Conversi, Pancini and Piccioni.

What's around the Physics Museum within a 10 minute walk

Leaving by the gate on Viale Regina Elena you are in a few minutes in San Lorenzo, which remains the liveliest and least tamed neighborhood in the area: workshops, murals, osterias that haven't changed their menu since the 1980s and new places that open every six months. From there, the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura deserves a full half hour: it is one of the seven pilgrim churches, has a building history that interlocks two distinct buildings and was badly hit in the bombing of July 19, 1943.

Next to the basilica is the Verano Cemetery, which is an open-air museum of 19th century sculpture and which no standard tourist guide sends you to see. On the opposite side of the campus, toward Via Nizza, the MACRO offers the contemporary counterpoint: from the brass of tuning forks to the art of the present in a quarter of an hour's walk.

For lunch, the indication is always the same: don't eat inside the campus. The university canteens and cafes work for students who have 20 minutes between two classes, not for those who have a day to spend well. 500 meters further, in San Lorenzo, you eat better and spend the same or less.

Quick questions about the Physics Museum

How much is the ticket?

Nothing. Entry is free: the museum issues no tickets and has no ticket office. What you need is not a payment but an agreement on the time.

Do you need to book to visit the Physics Museum?

For the guided visit yes. You find in the visit calendar published by the museum a slot marked LIBERO and write to the management at direzionemuseo.fisica@uniroma1.it. The independent visit is possible only at the hours the calendar shows as free.

Where exactly is the Physics Museum?

On the first and third floors of the Fermi Building, Department of Physics of the Sapienza, University City, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome. The museum also publishes the what3words coordinates agganci.leone.sterzi.

Is the Physics Museum the same as the Fermi Center on Via Panisperna?

No. They are two distinct bodies. The Physics Museum belongs to the Department of Physics of the Sapienza. The Enrico Fermi Historical Museum of Physics and Study and Research Center, acronym CREF, is a public research body based at Via Panisperna 89 A with guest entrance from Piazza del Viminale 1.

How do you get to the Physics Museum by public transport?

Metro line B, Policlinico stop. From Termini the university indicates the surface lines 310 and 492. On foot from Termini it is about 20 minutes.

How long does the visit take?

With a guide, an hour and a quarter for both floors. Alone, 40 minutes, but with a much lower return.

Can you take photographs at the Physics Museum?

Ask whoever accompanies you before shooting: since it is a museum inside an active department, the directions of the staff on duty that day apply. In any case, no flash on the display cases and no contact with the photographic plates.

Is the Physics Museum suitable for children?

With a guided visit yes, and very much so, especially from age 11 up. Without a guide it becomes a walk among mute display cases and the little ones tire quickly.

Is the Physics Museum wheelchair accessible?

The building has elevators, but the actual access conditions to the rooms need to be agreed with the museum management at the time of booking, and the management indicates the practicable route.

Is there a bookshop or a cafeteria?

No. The museum states it has neither a bookshop nor a cafeteria, since it is a university museum, and notes that in the surroundings the places for refreshment are many.

How many instruments are on display at the Physics Museum?

About 600 specimens, mostly datable between 1870 and 1930. The online catalog lists more than 200 described entries.

What are the sections of the collection?

Seven: mechanics, air pumps, acoustics, electricity and magnetism, optics, spectroscopy and the Fermi Collection.

What does the Fermi Collection contain?

The Hilger Littrow spectrographs called crocodiles, the photographic plates of the spectra, ionization chambers, Geiger-Müller counters, two Wilson chambers, a trochoidal electromagnet, a butterfly electrostatic voltmeter, the radon-beryllium neutron source, the 1936 electrostatic accelerator and the small model of the 1945 Conversi, Pancini and Piccioni experiment.

When was the Physics Museum born?

The core dates back to the Sapienza Physics Theater established in 1748. The new Physics Museum was set up in 1857 in the Palazzo della Sapienza. The present display, born from the recovery of the salvaged instrumentation, dates to 1978.

Who is the director?

Professor Adele La Rana, with Dr. Darica Paradiso as curator of the museum area. The Museum Council includes the director of the Department of Physics and other faculty of the university.

Is the Physics Museum open in the evening or on weekends?

Not as a rule. Evening and holiday openings take place within the initiatives of the Sapienza Museum Hub and the Night of the Museums, with dates announced from time to time in the news section of the museum's website.

Is there a line to get in?

No, and it's one of its greatest merits. With no ticket office and working on agreed slots, there are no lines. The cost, if anything, comes up front: you have to book.

Are there guided tours in English at the Physics Museum?

Availability needs to be asked directly of the management when booking, indicating the desired language. The museum's website has an English version.

What is the difference between the Physics Museum and an interactive science museum?

A substantial one. Here you don't touch buttons: you look at the original instruments with which physics was really done. It is a historical museum of scientific instruments, not an outreach center with hands-on stations.

Can I combine the Physics Museum with another museum on the same day?

Yes, and it's advisable. Inside the University City you reach on foot in a few minutes the Gipsoteca, the Contemporary Art Laboratory Museum, the Primo Levi Chemistry Museum and the University Earth Sciences Museum.

Does the Physics Museum have a searchable catalog?

Yes. The museum's website publishes a catalog with more than 200 entries, arranged alphabetically by type of object, from Koenig's harmonic analyzer to Ruhmkorff's coil.

What is there to see near the Physics Museum?

The Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, the Verano Cemetery, the San Lorenzo neighborhood and, a bit further on, the MACRO. On the scientific front, the other museums of the Sapienza Museum Hub.

Where do I find official information on the Physics Museum?

On the museum's website, museofisica.web.uniroma1.it, on the contacts and guided tours page and in the entry of the Sapienza Museum Hub.

In the end, the reason I come back to the Physics Museum whenever I can is simple, and has nothing to do with Fermi. It has to do with the fact that these objects were built by someone who had to solve a real problem, with the brass and glass they had, and who almost always solved it better than necessary. A standard liter closed by a glass disc to beat surface tension is an idea worth a degree. Go with your reservation made and with a full hour ahead of you, ask to have both floors opened, and have the instruments told to you by someone who knows them. It's not a museum you use up in a stroll: it's a museum you earn.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

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