Founded in 1871 under the auspices of Eng. Quintino Sella, Minister of Finance in the Lanza government.
The cultural project of the new installation, supervised by Architect Olindo Merone, was coordinated by geologist and popularizer of science Mario Tozzi together with students and teachers of the Geotechnical course. The museum consists of two halls:
Room A: The first room of the Museum entitled “The Bricks of the Earth,” which introduces the visitor to the world of mineralogy through a multimedia set-up that displays a careful selection of minerals, drawn from the entire collection, and recounts, with a sequence of specially filmed images enjoyed through monitors and video projections, the formation of the Iglesiente geographic landscape by the four natural elements, water, air, earth, and fire, and the passage of geological time that marks the slow process of earth formation from its origins.
Hall B: The second hall opened in 2021, contains ancient cases that store minerals divided by type: Sulfides, (galena pyrite, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, antimonite, molybdenite, arsenopyrite, ulmanite), Carbonates (calcite aragonite), Oxides, phosphate and vanadate silicates from the mines (monteponite, goethite, magnetite, hematite, hydrozincite smithsonite, hemimorphite, rosasite, pyromorphite, phosgenite), Sulfates (barite, anglesite, gypsum, jarosite), and showcases devoted to minerals subdivided by origin from the Monteponi, San Giovanni, Fluminese, and Montevecchio mines.
