St. Aloysius college museum

St. Aloysius College Museum

Not sure who this man is

How to get there?

 Ask anybody…An auto driver or a conductor in a bus if they’d get you to St. Aloysius College, and they’ll surely help or at least give u directions. Everybody knows where it is in the city of Mangalore.

Entry fee to the Museum:  Rs.5 (Beat that!) 

Mounted animal heads

Isolated in a corner of the campus, if you ask anybody who belongs to Aloysius directions to get there they’d help you out. But how many Aloysians have actually visited the museum and checked it out? I won’t be surprised if I was the only 1, in a million years, to be there along with my friends in school.

Unknown

To my surprise, there is a substantial collection of things inside right from antiques, to vessels used by the locals dated centuries ago, fossils, skeletons’ and skins of various animals, and stuffed animal heads mounted on walls, the first 4 wheel drive in town, statues of a few warriors, wide collection of really old written books, the first cloak and the bible used by the priest centuries ago, a mimic of a balcony used by the priests to preach sermons back then, preserved reptiles and human organs etc.

Shell of a tortoise

The piano

What caught my attention was this really old Piano placed in the corner. I’m sure it was used somewhere between the year 1400-1500, tentatively when the Portuguese landed in town giving rise to Christianity in Mangalore.

Hardware or a computer

  

Gran pa's clock

This maybe nitpicking but,

1. A lot of the stuff at the museum is shoddily dumped with no depicts or write-up of where it came from or who it belonged to or how it was discovered or brought into being.

Turtle

De Dion Bouton - 1906

2.  Its a huge area considering they have a basement to it and yet it is overcrowded. Some things that are placed there are as clear as mud.

For most of you who would be interested, the car to the right is 104 years old, made by a French automobile manufacturer De Dion Bouton. The car belong to P.F Saldanha was sparingly used in those days due to shortage of petrol. It was the largest manufacturer of cars in 1900. The 1903  De Dion Bouton 8 CV is now at Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile

Antiques

3. Maintenance to that place should be given top priority.

Crocodile

4. If faculties are planning on getting their students there, please ensure you do your homework as they would shoot a lot of questions considering they get very inquisitive at their age. Else history would take a back seat, as some idols of rulers or warriors do not have any identification.

If you happen to visit the St. Aloysius College in Mangalore and want to know what is in the entire 36 acre land, then this is one place you surely don’t want to miss. I visited this place twice and it was still not enough to learn J.

A cart

Written and edited by,

Laveena Dsouza