Verona's civic museum is among the most prestigious in Italy and Europe, and its history begins centuries ago. The pharmacist Francesco Calzolari, who had a pharmacy in Piazza delle Erbe, the Campana d'Oro, began to take an interest in the medicinal herbs that grew on Mount Baldo and created his own naturalistic museum in Verona (among the first in the world, called the Stanza delle meraviglie) around the middle of the 16th century and which can be considered the first nucleus of the museum collections. Subsequent collections were then collected by other important and cultured Verona personalities from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as physicians, pharmacists, herbalists, and nobles who, for reasons of personal interest and study, began to systematically collect various specimens and artifacts related to scientific and naturalistic study.