A shit museum ?

The first permanent exhibition dedicated to this inescapable part of human and animal existence was opened in 2016 on the Isle of Wight, located off the south coast of England.

The National Museum of the Poo exhibits all kinds of feces: from the baby to the lion, a pigeon, a fox, a meerkat, an elk ... And even shows fossilized poop of reptiles with millions of years. All of them are stored encapsulated in resin spheres.

The museum is located in the zoo of the island, and at the time of its inauguration, instead of the usual decorative red ribbon, cut a roll of toilet paper. Very appropriate. Naturally, inside the enclosure, the souvenir shop is not lacking, in which you can buy plastic replicas of different types of poop and other scatological objects.

The presentation text on the website of the museum synthesizes its philosophy very well, evoking how important the poop is, how it delights the youngest of the house and how the rejection and silence about it is already learned as adults.

Remember, moreover, that recent research has shown how important these intestinal bacteria can be for medical advances that go daily through the pipes and sewers of our towns and cities. Topics like this -continues the text- are those that the museum wants to explore, as well as "examine our relationship with the poop and change forever our way of thinking about this amazing substance."

In Italy there is the Museo da Merda

But this is not the only museum in the world that has as its protagonist animal defecations. In 2015 it opened its doors, in the medieval Italian castle of Castelbosco, located about 100 kilometers from Milan, the Museu da Merda ('museum of shit').

After its opening is an agricultural entrepreneur named Gianantonio Locatelli, who wanted to give some kind of ecological, productive and cultural use to the excrement generated by his 3,500 milk producing cows used to make Gradano Padano cheese, which generate tons of manure per year . Among the many applications he has found, is to convert these feces into biogas, which is used to generate energy -including the one required by the heating system of its facilities-. Also, it uses them to produce fertilizer.

And it also gives these waste a somewhat more eccentric use: it has created a museum that displays photographs, paintings and also illustrations inspired by this eschatological theme or even made with paints made with excrement, as in the case of the works of Roberto Coda Zabetta , who used a mixture of manure, pigments and resins to carry out his works.

Also, in the museum is highlighted other benefits of manure: as throughout history has been used medicinally (in combination with plants) or even as construction material.