They are reasons which have to do with the ethical and cultural value of science. The visitor will be able to appreciate the exceptional figure of a scientist who was able to condense into a single life a carefree youth without much desire to study, an adventurous five year long voyage around the world which was so dense in wonder that it would seem to be a perfect bildungsroman, a second trip in London which was all in the mind following an unmentionable and revolutionary intuition and twenty endless years in working silence in the countryside of Kent, the death of his most-beloved daughter and then an almost theatrical rush of events: the casual reading of a potential rival, the race to publication, the worldwide success of the Origin of the species , the scandal in the age’s social circles, the withdrawal from the polemic, the fame, his apparently bizarre works in old age, the anxieties of eternal life of his wife, the honour of a burial in Westminster next to Newton. Everything in a single man, who perhaps didn’t want it. What amazes is that Darwin’s legacy today is no less rich than his biography, to the point that we are still learning from his least known texts. There is the naturalist Darwin who gifts science with an essential explanation to organise into a single coherent frame all of our knowledge on the living world. There is the researcher Darwin with his peculiar method of investigation and the original mix between observation, theory and the unification of scattered facts. There is the prefiguring Darwin, who knew how to sometimes be more modern than his own epigones. There is the private Darwin who broods for decades on the consequences of his discoveries and doesn’t surrender to consolatory short cuts. There is all of this, but also his surprising links with Italy and a special section dedicated to human evolution in the great bicentenary exhibition with will open in Rome’s Palazzo delle Espozioni on the 12th February. With Darwin nature becomes an exciting tale, a history of diversity, of common ancestors, of changing contexts, of unpredictable events, of possibilities more than necessities. There really is “something grandiose in this vision of life”.