By Philipp Blom:
Three Old men:
"Three Old Men" follows the experiences Philipp Blom had in interacting with three different men as he took interest in their passions, that being the collecting of knowledge, artifacts and curiosities. Each had significance in being elderly as they he was able to look back on the collection that these men had spent a lifetime curating.
Willem Eldert Blom was the great grandfather of the author, who died before he had a chance to have much personal experience with him. Much of what Blom knows about his grandfather is based on vague memory, assumption, and the assorted books and bric-a-brac that his family had inherited after he died.
Georg Moritz was a wealthy old man who lived in the school Blom attended. Moritz had also accumulated a vast collection of books to which Blom had taken an interest in.
Wolf Stein was the last of the three men that Blom had talked about. Much like the other old men, Stein had an obsession with collecting books. As the passage goes on it is explained that Stein was a jewish man that had been a survivor of a concentration camp during world war 2. Stein was explained to have missed out on traditional education in his youth, and so even well into his later years he sought to collect knowledge and pursue education.
The Dragon:
"The Dragon" revolves around the collection of Ulisse Aldrovandi, who specialized in collecting and studying strange creatures. A juvenile creature that could only be described as a dragon was killed by a bystander. Aldrovandi preserved the creature to study it, and this led to him collecting odd specimens across the animal kingdom that he curated into a museum. although the original dragon no longer exists, the remains of his collection are now in the Museum of Palazzo Poggi.
The photo shows what survived of Aldrovandi's collection in the Palazzo Poggi. There is a wide variety of creatures as well as a handful of items and paintings.
https://sma.unibo.it/en/the-university-museum-network/museum-of-palazzo-poggi/collections/gallery-museo-di-palazzo-poggi\
