The new “Centro di Interpretazione delle Raccolte Don Sante Felici”(Interpretation center of Don Sante Felici’s collections), opened in July 2006, is located on the second floor of the building where there once was the primary school of Farneta, a few meters away from the beautiful Abbey dedicated to the Virgin of the Assumption. The old building has been completely renowned by Comune di Cortona, in order to make available the spaces conceived for the museum setup.

At the moment the small museum hosts only a part of the big collection of paleontological finds gathered over years of study and research by Don Sante Felici, the former parish priest of Farneta, who preserved all the materials he had found little by little in what he called the “Home-made museum”, next to the abbey. Unfortunately this museum is closed at the moment, because the restoration and reorganization works are still in progress.

The displayed materials belong completely to the collection gathered by Don Sante, who starting from the 1960s found a lot of fossils dating back to the Lower Pleistocene (about one million years ago) in the countryside around Cortona. The majority of these fossils have been discovered and brought back to light during the excavation works for the A1 (Autostrada del Sole) highway construction and for tracking the high speed rail network, when several quarries were dug for extracting sand. In the new museum, whose setup has been renowned in July 2010 during the events called “Notti dell’Archeologia” (Nights of Archaeology), a series of fossil finds of terrestrial vertebrates and of freshwater mollusks is today displayed. You can admire fossils of Mammuthus meridionalis vestinus, a big elephant, usually 3.5 meters high at the withers, of hippo (Hippopotamus antiquus), rhino (Stephanorhinus etruscus), deer (Pseudodama farnetensis), hyena (Pachycrocuta brevirostris) and equines (Equus stenonis e Equus stehlini). These big mammals lived in the Valdichiana during the Quaternary Ice Age, when this area was characterized by a hot climate and an environment of savannah and woods. The exhibition is enriched with numerous panels showing the displayed finds, the places where they have been discovered and the geological and paleontological periods in the area around Farneta.

The fossils found in Farneta and displayed in the “Centro di Interpretazione delle Raccolte Don Sante Felici” are an important paleontological heritage, as it is attested by some researches carried out by a lot of researchers. The great scientific value of this heritage is documented in a 1977 report of a faunistic unit called “Unità Faunistica Farneta” (Azzaroli, 1977).

At the moment the “Centro di Interpretazione delle Raccolte Don Sante Felici” can be only visited if you make a reservation by contacting directly the MAEC - Museum of the Etruscan Academy and of the City of Cortona ph. 0575/637235 – 630415 info@cortonamaec.org or the Associazione Amici del Museo Fatto in Casa Don Sante Felici at the Hotel Farneta – ph. 0575/610241 – 610013

By Dott.ssa Laura Gremoli