Natural History Museum of Venice

Long before it became a museum, the Fondaco dei Turchi was one of Venice's grandest private palaces, a Veneto-Byzantine residence built in the 13th century on the Grand Canal, with the tiered arcades and rounded windows typical of the style. In 1621, the Republic converted it into a fondaco — a combined warehouse, lodging house, place of worship, and trading post — for Ottoman merchants, a role it held for more than two centuries until the city took it back in 1838, by which point it had fallen into serious disrepair.

What visitors see today owes as much to the 19th century as to the 13th. Between 1862 and roughly 1890, the engineer Federico Berchet carried out a sweeping restoration, stripping away later additions and rebuilding the crenellated turrets and roofline almost from scratch — a project still debated by historians as more of a stylistic reinvention than a faithful repair. In 1923, on Berchet's own proposal, the restored palace reopened as Venice's Civic Museum of Natural History.

The museum's undisputed star is the mounted skeleton of Ouranosaurus nigeriensis, a roughly 7-metre plant-eating dinosaur recognizable by the tall spines running down its back. It has stood on display since 1975, the result of a 1972–73 expedition to the Ténéré desert in Niger led by the Venetian explorer and collector Giancarlo Ligabue, whose finds there rank among the most complete Ouranosaurus remains ever recovered.

The same expedition brought back the skull of Sarcosuchus, a colossal Cretaceous relative of the crocodile that could grow well beyond the length of any crocodilian alive today. Displayed near the Ouranosaurus, it gives a sense of just how outsized the Ténéré's prehistoric fauna once was — and why the finds became the museum's calling card.