There are numerous establishments in Europe in which medicines were prepared and sold, which have been totally or partially stored inside the containers in which they were stored. The name of these establishments changes depending on different variables, such as their religious or secular origin, but also from the period they arose, among other aspects. In these apothecaries, pharmacies, spezierias and workshops ingredients were combined for the preparation of complex formulations that can be identified through interdisciplinary studies in which physicists, chemists, historians, art historians, botanists, geologists and pharmacists, among other specialists, collaborate to broadening the knowledge that exists about the treatment of the disease in the past and its projection over time.

From remote times one of the ingredients that were used for this purpose were pigments and other coloring substances that had wide use in the field of arts, rite and medicine, such as malachite, lapis lazuli, the Armenian bowl, cinnabar, hematite, indigo or purple, among many others. This allows us to explore the drug-color binomial through this 1th European Symposium and analyze its evolution at different times and cultures. Physical-chemical results and historical studies obtained to date in these collections, such as the one preserved in the ancient Spezieria of Santa Maria della Scala (Rome), show that the therapeutic knowledge of ancient cultures, such as Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Next Ancient East continued in force in the pharmaceutical science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The science of healing according to Islamic tradition, those originating in pre-Columbian America or in the ancient civilizations of the Indus Valley were also perpetuated and arrived in Europe between the Middle Ages and the Modern Era, and this makes these spaces an authentic cultural mosaic of invaluable material and intangible heritage. The musealization of this rich cultural heritage, in situ, but also through virtual musealizations of a multisensory nature, favors access to knowledge that approximates, once again, the fields of science and art, and that allows us to understand much better certain cultural syntheses present in traditions and customs, but also beliefs related to health and disease, in our daily lives.