Di Umana Natura (Of Human Nature) is a physical and digital exhibition created by the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua, in collaboration with the Turri family, as part of the PNRR project “National Biodiversity Future Centre - NBFC”.

Through the photographs of geographer Eugenio Turri (1927–2005), one of the most attentive and original Italian scholars of 20th-century landscape, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on how the extraordinary biodiversity that characterises the Mediterranean region is also the result of millennia of interaction between humans and the environment: migration, agricultural practices, domestication and local knowledge.

Turri's sensitive and trained eye was able to capture the signs of this long history of harmony with extreme effectiveness, but it also conveyed with equal force the tensions and transformations that, since the second half of the 20th century, have been compromising this balance.

Thanks to the PNRR project, the Museum of Geography has digitised a selection of around 7,000 photographs from Eugenio Turri's photographic archive, taken between the 1960s and the early 2000s, making it possible to access and critically re-examine the work of this great geographer.


How to use this exhibition

The digital version of the exhibition is divided into four sections.

  • The first section is dedicated to the physical exhibition held in the Music Room of the Geography Museum of the University of Padua, from 30 May to 15 September 2025. Its subsections revisit the highlights of the inauguration, allowing visitors to relive the exhibition through a virtual tour and read comments left by visitors in the exhibition guest book.
  • The second section, Di Umana Natura (Of Human Nature), represents the digital development of the physical exhibition: it reproduces its five sections — Water, Plants, Animals, Stones and Soils, People — but expands the number of photographs available in the galleries.
  • The third section, Biodiversity on the Map, provides a synoptic view of the photographs, georeferencing them on a map of the Mediterranean region.
  • Finally, the fourth section is dedicated to Eugenio Turri and explores his life and work through a story map.