From the time the Botanical Garden of Padua came into being (1545), the idea was always that, along with the site intended for “planting, ordering and preserving” plant life recognizable via the senses, there should be spaces for studying the subject of medicines — ‘fondarie’ and ‘distillatorie’ — and places to keep “minerals, soils, stones and jewels”, also marine and terrestrial animals and birds, so as to create, as it were, a museum or theatre of the world, explorable via the categories of science known at the time.

It was only in the 1700s, with the growth of modern science and the emergence of botany as a separate discipline, that new facilities for teaching and research were discussed and, in the following century, put in place: heated greenhouses (circa 1808-1814), a library and a herbarium (1835), a large semicircular lecture hall (1842) and laboratories equipped with microscopes and other instruments for chemical and physiological research (1880), all of which enlarged and modernized over the years (1927 and 1935).

Together with construction of the large biodiversity greenhouses, the period since 2014 has seen the addition of new laboratories dedicated to plant research, conducted by researchers associated with various departments of the University of Padua (especially DiBio, DAFNAE and TESAF), who are carrying on an activity now centuries old.