The Museo Calderini occupies the second floor of the palazzo dei Musei in Varallo, plus a few ground-floor rooms, and shares the building with the civic Pinacoteca. Pietro Calderini founded it in 1867: a priest and naturalist from the Valsesia, born at Borgosesia on 8 November 1824 and died at Varallo on 19 May 1906, who was also among the first members and activists of the Italian Alpine Club. At the start it was meant to be only a natural-science museum serving the town's technical schools; then donations from scholars, from the valley and beyond, pushed the collections into archaeology, anthropology and the human sciences at large. When the founder died the museum took his name.
What to see
The natural-history section holds zoology, botany, mycology, palaeontology and earth sciences together, but the richest part is the ornithological one: around 500 specimens on display. The entomological collections are solid too, and have grown through substantial recent donations. Archaeology rests on three cores: the Egyptian one, with about a hundred finds, the Greco-Roman, and the protohistoric, which gathers artefacts of the Golasecca culture found in the Valsesia. The demo-ethno-anthropological section keeps some of the non-European objects brought to Italy by the steam corvette Magenta, which sailed round the world between 1865 and 1868; beside them stand the material culture of the valley and a numismatic collection.
Visiting
The humanities section surprises anyone who came in expecting stuffed birds only: there are letters and autograph texts by Giuseppe Mazzini, Silvio Pellico and Giuseppe Garibaldi, parchments and rare books on scientific, medical and naturalistic subjects, and a number of documents on the history of the Walser, the German-speaking settlers of the upper valley. The museum went through a long spell of closure and reordering, during which you could only get in by appointment, and reopened to the public in 2017.
Our editors' tip
Look at the bird cases thinking about the man who filled them: a mountain priest who collected for the schools of his own town and who stood in the front rank of the Italian Alpine Club. The Calderini has stayed that kind of museum, grown by an accumulation of private curiosity rather than by design, and it shows: the rooms put a bird, an Egyptian find and a letter from Garibaldi side by side because someone, at some point, carried them up here. It is the opposite of a museum planned at a desk, and that is its best quality. The Pinacoteca occupies the first and second floors of the same building: one door and the next, and you pass from natural science to Gaudenzio Ferrari.