The Museum is housed in the Fontego dei Turchi, a palace built by the Pesaro family in the first half of the 13th century. Today, the Fontego is one of the most remarkable civic buildings in Venice and one of the most characteristic of those bordering the Grand Canal. It was later purchased by the Republic of Venice, and over the years it was alternately used as a representative site to accommodate foreign dignitaries as well as entrusted to various noble families. An important chapter in its history began in 1621, when the Palace was used as a dwelling place and business site by the Ottoman merchants, who were importing especially wax, oil, raw wool, leather and tobacco into Venice.
From 1860, it began to be totally rebuilt, architecturally inspired by the “double loggia” structure of the Venetian-Byzantine style derived from the sixteenth century plans of Jacopo de' Barbari. After the restoration, it became home of the “Raccolta Correr”, the early core of the Correr Civic Museum, which was later moved to San Marco Square in the early 1920s.
Since 1923, incorporating the main historical scientific collections of the city, especially those from the Correr Civic Museum, the “Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti”, the private collection of count Alessandro Pericle Ninni, and many others, it became the Museum of Natural History of Venice. Today, with more than two million specimens (animals, plants, fossils, minerals, ethnographic objects, etc.), the Museum is among the reference institutions for natural science research and dissemination in Italy.