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Rettorato, Polo Museale | Rectorate, Museum Complex 95

Casa Frignani confined to the north with Palazzo Universitario and
faced on via Università, at the intersection with corso Canalgrande. The
Duke, aware of the necessities of the University and of the advanta-
geous occasion coming from the location of Casa Frignani, decided
to approve the purchase on January 8, 1840. The following year the
building became university property.
Between 1842 and 1848, the engineer Cesare Costa, a professor at the
Faculty of Physics and Maths of the University, presented to the Minis-
ter of Public Economics and Education the drawings of three different
projects that would redefine the layout of the ground floor, first and
second floors of Palazzo Universitario after the acquisition of Casa Frig-
nani. In particular, as regards to the ground floor’s first project (1842),
Costa had planned to maintain the axis of the columned-loggia of the
existing plant parallel to the Via Castellaro – now via Università – and to
extend it as far as a squared atrium and a large colonnade. His aim was
to highlight a new entrance next to the existing one, to which a third
entrance would be added in order to create a single building body. The
façade would have three equidistant gates corresponding to the three
traversing orthogonal axes to the loggia. Together with this project,
Costa presented a second more approximate one that envisaged a large
courtyard in correspondence of the central axis. In 1849 with a third
project, not dissimilar from the second, Costa provided a more precise
reorganisation of the premises on the ground floor.
Because of bureaucracy’s slowdowns and of difficulty in freeing the
rooms of Casa Frignani from previous tenants, none of Costa’s projects
could be realised. In 1879, almost forty years later, Gustavo Uziel-
li, Professor of Mineralogy and Zoology, in order to underline the
great importance of ‘premises for laboratories and museums’ among
the University’s needs, he proposed three possible solutions to improve
the rooms for the laboratories of Chemistry, Mineralogy and Geology,

Collections of the Museum of Tropical Medicine “Giuseppe Franchini”, Palazzo Universitario, Modena