The Industrial Heritage Museum is located on the northern outskirts of Bologna in the former Galotti Battiferro Furnace , along the Navile Canal , the city's ancient navigable canal.

The museum is entirely dedicated to the Bolognese industry and tells the story of industrial Bologna, from the Middle Ages to the present day . The collections consist of a main nucleus made up of material from technical institutes and used for educational applications: tools, models, machines running on hydraulic, electric and steam energy, and models presented at international exhibitions of the last century .

While the first floor focuses on more contemporary aspects by analyzing the latest studies on economics and new applications of technological research , the second floor has a more historical character. Here, in fact, three fundamental thematic nuclei are explored: the Bologna of water and silk of the fifteenth-eighteenth century, the Bologna of the mechanical culture of the early twentieth century and the production sectors of the modern industrial district (motor engineering, biomedical, production of automatic machines for the packaging).