Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano

Milan's oldest civic museum occupies a striking neo-Gothic palace of terracotta and Lombard red brick inside the Indro Montanelli Public Gardens on Corso Venezia. The Civic Natural History Museum presents dinosaurs and fossils, vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, human evolution and minerals in gallery halls that preserve the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century temple of science.

Why it matters

Founded in the nineteenth century, the museum is the eldest of Milan's civic institutions and remains one of Italy's major natural history collections. Its building is itself a landmark — a purpose-designed museum palace whose polychrome facade faces the Public Gardens — and its halls still follow the classic sequence of the discipline: palaeontology, zoology, human evolution and mineralogy. The museum documents how the city's collectors built an encyclopaedic view of nature that the city has stewarded ever since.

What to notice

The permanent exhibitions, as listed by the museum, run from "Dinosaurs and other Fossils" through halls of Vertebrates and Invertebrates to the "History of Human Evolution" and the minerals gallery. The classic habitat dioramas stage nineteenth- and twentieth-century taxidermy against painted backdrops, a craft the museum preserves as part of its identity. The Osteno display, "a window on the Jurassic," presents remarkable fossil preservation from a Lombard site. Ceiling frescoes and architectural detail in the stairway halls reward attention, as does the museum's own research identity, documented in its publications and specialised laboratories. The museum's library supports its scholarly work and research.

Context and history

The museum's canon holds that it was founded in 1838, when the municipal authority accepted the donation of the collections of the naturalist Giuseppe De Cristoforis — a gift made on condition that it be shown to the public, with Giorgio Jan as first director — making it the oldest civic museum of Milan. Its current home is a nineteenth-century building by Giovanni Ceruti erected within the Public Gardens: a palace conceived specifically as a museum of natural science and, by the museum's own account, the first Italian museum building purpose-built as a civic museum. Over more than a century and a half it has accumulated collections spanning botany, zoology, palaeontology and mineralogy, and it forms, with the Civic Aquarium and the Planetario, the natural-science branch of the city's civic museum system. The building's eclectic neo-Gothic facade, in terracotta and brick, is a deliberate statement of the museum's civic pride and remains one of Corso Venezia's most photographed frontages.