The Marquis de Mauroy

The meteorite collection at the Vatican exists today due to the efforts of Adrien-Charles, Marquis de Mauroy (1848-1927). A distinguished agronomist and gentleman-scientist, his collection of minerals was famous throughout Europe, and his meteorite collection was said to have been the second largest private collection in the world. 

The Marquis hoped to found a Museum of Natural History at the Vatican and in 1896 he offered to donate a collection of 1800 rocks and minerals. However, at the time the Specola was located in cramped quarters within the Vatican itself, where the was no room for this collection. Instead, in 1907 a subset of the de Mauroy meteorite collection (104 pieces) was donated by the Marquis; another 50 meteorite samples were added in 1912.

The Marquis died in 1927; in 1935, his widow Marie Caroline Eugénie donated the bulk of the remaining pieces to the Vatican, which now had space in Castel Gandolfo to house them. 

These materials may originally have inspired the idea of a spectra lab, though in practice only a small number of meteorite samples had their spectra recorded in this lab. Instead, beginning in the 1990s the meteorite collection has become the focus of an intense program to measure the physical properties of these bits of the asteroid belt, the Moon, and Mars.