Francesco Calzolari was an apothecary in Verona and owned the most famous pharmacy in the city. As an apothecary, Calzolari's collection focussed on therapeutics, especially those believed to have miraculous properties. The cabinet is described by a contemporary physician, Antonio Passieno, as follows:

"a most abundant repository and true treasure of all remarkable medicinal things, in which I observed each one placed in wonderful order in most decorative and elegant compartments and cases. First, [Calzolari] sought exceptional herbs and then the rest from their own distant places and regions, sent to him as gifts from the greatest princes and rulers; here it is pleasing to see not a few whole plants and plant roots, rinds, hardened or liquid saps, gums, flowers, leaves, fruits, and rare seeds and to recognize them as authentic. Also many metals. I omit how many dried terrestrial and aquatic animals I was astounded to find that I had never seen before."

 

Image: etching of Francesco Calzolari's collection published in an inventory of his cabinet from 1622. The image's inscription: "Viewers, insert your eyes. Contemplate the wonders of Calzolari's museum and pleasurably serve your mind."

The image of Calzolari's cabinet displays a selection of birds, fish, snakes, and animals including what appears to be a small hammerhead shark, several puffer fish, an oversized hedgehog, starfish, a tortoise head, a deformed mummified human head, a crocodile, bat, flying fish, and a spotted creature with a long tail which might perhaps be ocelot. Most of the creatures would have been dried.

Two catalogues were published detailing the cabinet's contents and the medicinal power and uses of his specimens. The first was published in 1584 by the Doctor Giovanni Battista Olivi (De reconditis et praecipuis collectaneis ab honestissimo et solertissimo Francisco Calceolari Veronensi in Musaeo adservatis) which was dedicated to their mutual friend, Girolamo Mercuriale, who taught at Padua. The catalogue was sparse (50 pages) and unillustrated as Olivi's primary goal was to make evident the vast extent of Calzolari's pharmaceutical items. The catalogue was more or less a medical treatise focussed on the practicle aspects of the museum by highlighting the museum as a medical repository and the links between the museum and the study of pharmacy. In other words, the museum was understood as an instrument for the examination and exploration of the natural world.

In 1622 Benedetto Ceruti and Andrea Chioco published the second catagloue, Museum Calceolarium, which appeared after Calceolari’s death when museum had been improved and transformed by his nephew Francesco Junior. The catalogue was almost 10 times as large, well illustrated, and tended to focus on the imaginative resonance of the natural world: symbolism, hidden truths, and imaginative flights of fancy. As Paula Findlen notes in Possessing Nature: Museums, Collectting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italty: "the first catalogue had been a product of debates about the proper ingredients in medicines, a topic of great interest in the late sixteenth century. The second catalogue displayed all the hallmarks of the humanist erudition cultivated in the academies of late Renaissance and Baroque Italy. While Olivi explored the possible uses of nature, Ceruti and Chiocco explored the imaginative possibilities of natural phenomena."