It was created by a rich guy named Luciano Nicolis, who collected a lot of stuff, some of it a bit odd. Classic cars, motorcycles, typewriters, cameras, musical instruments, ... and bicycles. I guess he got tired of paying to have all the stuff warehoused so he built a museum around it to make it pay for itself.
From the advertisement that I saw I thought it was mostly cars, but when I got to the floor that had all the bicycles in it, there was a side-by-side line of bikes in the middle of the room that had the complete evolution of the road bike on display. At one end was a Draisine and at the other end was a carbonfiber Bianchi with 10-sp Campy Record Ergo. And in between was every major technical innovation in the history of the bicycle, all arranged in the order of invention.
It literally was the evolutionary tree of the road bike.
A Draisine, likely a replica, but still ....
After the Draisine they added a steering head. After the steering head they added pedal power. Then brakes. Then derailleurs, three speeds up to 10 (this was some years ago, before 11, 12 or 13-sp). If it happened, it's here.
Front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive. Direct drive (high-wheeler/penny-farthings), bellcrank drive, chain drive, belt drive, and shaft drive.
Solid tires, pneumatic tires, airless tires; wooden rims and metal rims.
They had one bike wearing Tullio Campagnolo's original quick releases. And if you know Campy history, you know that's how he got into bicycle components.
And the derailleurs! There must have been a dozen crazy designs and operation methods before the 1951 Campy articulating parallelogram shifter.
A 4-sp derailleur with the control lever mounted on the drive side seat tube. The rider would have to bend down and reach around his leg to twist the lever and shift gears.
A 1947 Bianchi with a 4-sp Campy rear derailleur. One lever steers the shifter cage, which moves the chainline. There's no jockey wheel to maintain chain tension so it has a second lever to allow sliding the axle fore or aft in the dropout.
HdG wouldn't allow derailleurs in the TdF until 1937 (said he didn't want it to become about the bike) so shifter technology didn't really take off until after that.
This next one was my favorite thing on display. They have a bicycle that doesn't have gears but its back wheel has a sprocket on both sides (Hodaka, anybody?). The small gear is for flat roads and the big one is for the mountains. The reason that seemingly primitive innovation was so noteworthy was that the whole time I had been interested in bicycles, I had been reading that this set-up was why cycling shorts traditionally are black.
In order to turn the wheel around and use the sprocket on the other side, you first had to un-ship the chain with your hand. And grease from the chain would get on your hand. So unless you wanted grease on your handlebar tape, you had to wipe it on something. And the shorts were the obvious choice.
So if shorts weren't already black they'd soon get that way. So just make them black to start with.
Notice there's also a sprocket on the non-drive side of the back wheel. Looks about 15-16t on the drive side and maybe 20-22 on the non.
I'd been searching for one of these for so long I was beginning to think it was a myth. Yet here it is, on a 1925 Bianchi.
If you're interested but can't make it to Italy right away, check out their website: https://www.museonicolis.com/en/category/bicycles/