The school was founded in 1898, at the time when Via della Colonna was extended as far as Borgo Pinti. This road split in half the ancient fifteenth-century monastery occupied by the Technical Institute, today called "Duca d'Aosta". Since the start of the 20th century, the halls of the secondary school have housed the scientific collections (physics and natural history) acquired for teaching purposes. The educational physics collection contains 78 instruments, belonging to the 19th and 20th centuries, utilised for experiments and demonstrations in physics (inclined plane, scales, spherometer, barometers). The naturalist collection (57 specimens) displays the vertebra of a prehistoric animal, stuffed animals, human and animal skeletons.