This story was told today by Massimo Appolloni, Curator of Malacology at the Museum, in the Sala Scheletri, before an attentive audience. The event is part of the series The Story Behind. Naturalists and Collections of the Museum, promoted by Roma Capitale. It was the account of how a scientific heritage is born, survives, and sometimes saved by a miracle.
Piersanti was not only a malacologist. He was a naturalist in the fullest sense, one of those men of the old school for whom science had no disciplinary boundaries. He wrote on botany, zoology, and natural sciences. He went as far as investigating the electrical nature of tumours, at a time when that path was still little explored. A strict and respected headmaster of the Liceo Visconti, he brought to the classroom the same curiosity with which he catalogued molluscs in his drawers.

At the heart of the conference were three figures bound by a common thread.
The Marquis of Monterosato, Tommaso Allery Di Maria (1841–1927), had built the most important Mediterranean malacological collection of his time, with over two million specimens. After his death, that collection risked being dispersed. It was thanks to the decisive intervention of Carlo Piersanti and Francesco Settepassi that the collection was acquired by the Museo Civico di Zoologia, where it remains to this day.
Francesco Settepassi (1886–1982) had begun collecting shells at the age of six and over the course of his life had built a collection of over one million specimens, accompanied by three volumes of the Atlante Malacologico which remain to this day a reference work for anyone studying the molluscs of the Mediterranean. It was he, together with Piersanti, who fought to ensure that Monterosato's treasure was not lost.

Appolloni traced this entire history with the precision of someone who knows every drawer of the collection, restoring names and faces to a heritage that always risks remaining invisible in the storerooms of a museum.

The conference closed with an unexpected and precious testimony. Enrico Migliaccio, who in 1956 had been a student of Piersanti at the Liceo Visconti, took the floor. He stood before the memory of a man who had lost a daughter on a night of war and had nonetheless continued to teach, to classify, to give. Migliaccio's words gave the story a living voice — that of someone who had known that headmaster in person, seated among the desks of one of the oldest schools in Rome.
The collections that the Museum preserves and studies today carry the weight of all this. Of a daughter lost, of a bombing raid, of fifty thousand shells saved.

*Board Member, SRSN (Roman Society of Natural Science)
Past Editor-in-Chief Italian Journal of Dermosurgery