Inside the park of Villa Mazzini is the City Aquarium, built at the beginning of the 60s by the Thalassographic Institute of Messina (it represents, together with the aquarium of Naples, the only scientific structure of this kind in Southern Italy). In the aquarium there are around seventy different species of fishes, mussels, shellfishes and reptiles from the Mediterranean Sea, housed in 22 tanks fed by an open circuit with seawater from the Straits.