The Museum’s collection takes us beyond the boundaries of physics, highlighting the connections that over the centuries have united physics with disciplines such as art, architecture, medicine, music, and psychology. Think, for example, of the pile-driver model linked to the reconstruction of the Palladian bridge of Bassano, or the machine that Poleni used to restore the Dome of St. Peter’s in Rome, which highlight the connections between the instruments of the Poleni Museum and the world of architecture.
We also remember the connections with medicine, illustrated among other things by an eighteenth-century pantograph that Poleni used for his studies on muscle mechanics, conducted together with his dear friend Giovanni Battista Morgagni, the well-known founder of pathological anatomy. The Museum’s rich collection of X-ray plates, which marked the birth of radiology in Padua, also stands out in this sense: they are today among the oldest plates of this type existing in the world and allow us to virtually enter a physics laboratory of the late nineteenth century.