World Rhino Day

The exhibition, which will remain open to the public until next 9 October 2022, explores through the presence of the taxidermy of Toby - the great white rhino who lived in the Natura Viva Park in Bussolengo - the issues of threats and actions for the conservation of these beautiful and fragile large mammals.

THE EXHIBITION. The shadow of the unicorn. Past, present and future of rhinos

The temporary exhibition at the MUSE is dedicated to rhinoceros: the five current species and the many fossil species. One section of the itinerary recounts the role this species played in the imagination of ancient peoples and the exoticism it fueled in the Western world. The narrative concludes with an in-depth look at the utter senselessness of the ruthless market revolving around rhino poaching and the alleged pharmacological use of the powder made from their horn.

Presented in all the grandeur that characterized the best years of his life, Toby is the exhibition's icon and the starting point for countless narratives: stories, sometimes individual, often collective, that bring to light the fascination exerted by woolly rhinos on Paleolithic artists of the last "ice age," plumb the myth of the unicorn in the cultures of the Mediterranean basin, revive the sense of exotic spectacularity with which this animal (as well as the elephant) was perceived by the few who in the Renaissance and past centuries were fortunate enough to see it.

Tales that try to investigate the deleterious Eighteenth-Nineteenth century passion for hunting safaris that exterminated so many great African and Asian animals and, finally, depict in all its absurd and brutal insignificance the faces of the global phenomenon of the "rhino market." A practice that is driving five majestic animal species to the brink of extinction.

In his new guise as a totemic animal, belonging to the collections of Trento's Muse, Toby still has much to tell.

The exhibition - curated by Osvaldo Negra and Alessandra Pallaveri, both of the MUSE  - is a collaboration between MUSE and Natura Viva Park in Bussolengo (Verona) and consists mainly of artifacts, photographic images and narrative videos.