Museum of Computing Instruments

About this place

In the mid-1950s the provinces of Pisa, Lucca and Livorno had money set aside for a particle accelerator, and Enrico Fermi advised the university to spend it on something else entirely, and to build rather than buy: an electronic calculating machine. The synchrotron went to Frascati outside Rome; the money stayed here. On 13 November 1961, with the President of the Republic Giovanni Gronchi in the room, the CEP — Calcolatrice Elettronica Pisana — was switched on: the first scientific computer designed and built in Italy, a joint effort between the university and Olivetti. That machine, more than three thousand vacuum tubes and two thousand transistors of it, has had a room of its own since 2002 — the surviving cabinets, the power unit, the memory racks and registers — and it is the reason this small museum exists at all. Around the CEP runs a much longer story: hand and mechanical reckoning instruments spanning some five centuries, from abacuses and proportional compasses to brass adding machines worked by a crank, and then the gallery of large calculators where the Olivetti ELEA 6001 and its siblings sit — machines that filled a whole room to do what your phone now finishes before you finish a sentence. The thread holding it together is not technology alone but the fact that Pisa became the birthplace of Italian computer science; the country's first school of the discipline grew out of these rooms. Let us be plain about it: this is a specialist museum, small and university-run, with no architectural drama and no scale to impress you, housed in the old slaughterhouse buildings about a ten-minute walk south-west of Piazza dei Miracoli. If you have one day in Pisa, the tower, the cathedral and the baptistery deserve it without argument. But if you are an engineer, a programmer or a computing student — or travelling with a teenager who loves machines — this is an hour spent standing at the beginning of something you live inside every day, for less than the price of a coffee. The real obstacle is not the price but the timetable. The museum runs on the university calendar: as the schedule currently stands, weekdays only, closed Saturday and Sunday, most days finishing at 14:30 with two longer days a week running to 18:00, and the calendar shifts in summer, when it moves to a 10:00 to 16:00 block. On that schedule it is out of reach on a weekend trip, though some past winter seasons have added a Saturday morning. Check the official site the same morning before you walk over, and plan a weekday visit.