The Earth is blue like an orange

The Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo hosts the exhibition The Earth Is Blue Like an Orange. The Mystery of Research, curated by Sylvain Bellenger.

Inspired by the celebrated verse by Paul Éluard, the exhibition, organized on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM), starts from the idea that art and science share the same drive toward the invisible and the same need to give form to the mystery of reality. Scientific truth and poetic truth do not stand in opposition: both seek to understand the world through images, intuitions, hypotheses, and visions.

The exhibition, created with the support of Fondazione Cariparo, is open to the public from 28 May to 30 September 2026.

Through an original dialogue between scientific images from the laboratories of VIMM and artistic images, the exhibition explores the creative force that art and science have in common. The exhibition route brings into relation works by contemporary artists, anatomical images, digital reconstructions, and scientific visualizations with the extraordinary images produced in the VIMM laboratories, which reveal cellular structures, neural networks, and forms of life that seem to belong as much to the language of science as to that of abstract and informal art. 

An exhibition where poetic truth and scientific truth meet as two complementary languages, capable of expressing the same awareness and the same sensitivity toward the human condition, precisely in Italy’s largest university museum of natural sciences. 

In addition to the selection of around 30 works that make up the exhibition, there is also a large site-specific multimedia installation created by the artist Stefano Gargiulo of Kaos Produzioni. In an immersive journey through images, matter, and light, the exhibition invites the public to reflect on the role of vision in understanding reality and on the ability of images to transform knowledge into sensory experience. Curiosity, intuition, discipline, and imagination emerge as tools shared by the researcher and the artist: both explore the world not to dominate it, but to make its complexity and mystery perceptible.

The exhibition is interwoven with the broader route of Padua città della Scienza, which makes it possible to visit not only the Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo, with its natural history collections that for centuries have made it possible to study nature and humankind, but also the Orto botanico and Palazzo del Bo, namely the places where, in the sixteenth century, the live study of medicinal plants and the human body began.

Admission is included in the Museum entrance ticket.

On Wednesday 29 July 2026, a guided themed tour is scheduled, in several time slots starting from 7 p.m., taking the public from the Orto botanico to the exhibition The Earth Is Blue Like an Orange. The Mystery of Research at the Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo.