There are mascots that come straight from prehistory. In the museum courtyard, Gaetano awaits you — a woolly mammoth that, thanks to its thick coat, hair up to 50 centimetres long and a dense layer of fat, was able to adapt to the glacial climate of its time.
The reconstruction is based on a find discovered by chance during an excavation in 1974 in Vidor, in the province of Treviso: the bones of a large Mammuthus primigenius that became trapped in mud between 20,000 and 70,000 years ago. The life-size replica displayed in the courtyard of Palazzo Amalteo was created for an exhibition on the Pleistocene and has since become one of the museum’s symbols.
