Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages! We now direct your attention to (drumroll, please) the Tibbals Learning Center, the grand new addition to the Ringling Circus Museum on the campus of Florida State University's John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, opening this month after years of planning and construction.

Passionate circus fan and major donor Howard Tibbals first approached the museum with the idea in 1998, but it was not until fall 2002 that the design for the nearly $9 million, 32,000-square-foot structure was approved and construction finally began. Judging from a pre-opening tour, it's been worth the wait.

From the canvas entrance canopy, an exact copy of the one used for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Big Top, to the scale of the folding chairs in the amazing Howard Bros. Circus model, everything in the Learning Center is about the highest-quality experience. The handsome two-story structure was designed by Harvard Jolly Cleese Toppe Architects of St. Petersburg.

Although celebrating America's-and Sarasota's-rich circus heritage at the museum of circus magnate John Ringling may seem like a given, it was not always so. During the 1920s, as Mable Ringling supervised the construction of their magnificent mansion, Cà d'Zan, and John focused on building an art museum, the idea of creating a museum for the circus on their bayfront property probably never crossed their minds.

More than 20 years passed before Chick Austin, the first Ringling Museum director, decided it would be a good idea to mount a circus display in the car garages along the service road leading to the Ringling residence. Since then the amount of space devoted to circus history and memorabilia has grown in a series of add-on structures that pale in comparison to the new building's splendor. (There are still circus displays in the smaller Circus Museum that stands near the Tibbals.)

According to curator Deborah Walk, "The Tibbals Learning Center will more than double the size of our circus exhibits, but equally important, the expansion will celebrate the people and the rich circus heritage of the area, and bring attention to Sarasota's rightful claim as home to the American circus."

Come along with us for an exhilarating sneak peek.

Step Right Up! When you first see the center from a distance, you notice the names of 30 circus owners (including P.T. Barnum, Irvin Feld, Carl Hagenbeck, John Bill Ricketts and, of course, John Ringling) inscribed near the roofline. As you enter the lobby, your eyes soar skyward 30 feet through a reproduction of a trapeze net. The stunning floor beneath your feet is polished pink marble, shipped in from Tennessee, and the nine-inch-thick walls are made of poured concrete that contains shell and red sand from north of Toronto. The architect wanted only one person to sandblast all the walls, many of which are curved, and hired a master blaster from Kissimmee to do the job. This decision paid off, as the walls are works of art themselves.

At the end of your procession you reach a small space where you can enjoy a five-minute video history of the circus. The wood on the floor in front of the first huge display case is white oak, purchased from the Tibbals Flooring Company in Oneida, Tenn. Before you is an 11-foot-high, 62-foot-wide glass case that rotates selections from Howard Tibbals' donated collection of 4,800 circus posters and works on paper. All have been digitized, and they're projected continuously on a wall to the right of the case. (You can see about 1,000 of them on the Web at Ringling.org.)

The Greatest Little Show on Earth The remarkable model circus, the main exhibition on the first floor, was created by master model builder Tibbals. He began building it in the basement of his parents' home in Oneida when he was 19. "The circus was the future," Tibbals, now 69, says of his boyhood passion for the Big Top. "The circus had electricity when most people did not; they showed us exotic animals we'd never have seen otherwise. It's an important part of our history."

Tibbals has traveled with his model circus over the years, packing it and unpacking it at every stop, the same way the real circus was unpacked and created afresh at every little town. While the circus often moved from town to town in 24 hours, Tibbals may take weeks to pack, because he's usually doing it by himself with some help from his wife, Janice.

For its final stop here in Sarasota, the arduous process of unloading and setting up Tibbals' Howard Bros. Circus-the largest miniature circus in the world-began 14 months ago. His model is a three-quarter-inch-to-the-foot replica of the American circus from a time when the tented circus was at its largest, circa 1925 to 1938. It contains hundreds of thousands of pieces: a four-foot-tall, 36-by-16-foot Big Top; 152 circus wagons; more than 500 animals; 1,500 performers, workers and staff; dinnerware for 900 working men; and 7,000 folding chairs (which actually fold and are stowed in five miniature circus wagons) to seat almost 3,000 circus patrons, whose individual clothes represent all walks of life during the 1920s and 1930s.