Description
The Museo di Storia Naturale of Milan is the museum of dinosaurs, dioramas and almost three million specimens, in a neo-Gothic building in the Giardini Pubblici of Porta Venezia.
Among its treasures is a famous fossil, a baby dinosaur called Ciro. He lives here, together with a life-size reconstructed triceratops, the cast of a tyrannosaur and the original skeletons of an allosaur and a gryposaur.
The museum was born in 1838, when the collector Giuseppe De Cristoforis and the botanist Giorgio Jan donated their collections to the city. The first director was Jan himself. It is the oldest civic museum in Milan.
The building is the work of Giovanni Ceruti, and was built between 1888 and 1893: the first museum architecture in Italy made expressly to be a museum. The model is the Natural History Museum in London.
The museum tells the story of the Earth on the raised ground floor: mineralogy, paleontology, the origin and evolution of plants and animals, up to the natural history of humankind. On the first floor is zoology.
Don't miss the 83 dioramas, the world's natural environments rebuilt at full scale, from savannas to tropical forests, from deserts to Antarctica. The first, from 1965, has an anaconda.
Also don't miss the dinosaur hall, and among the rarities a giant clam, one of the ten largest in the world, and the cetacean hall, with the beaked whale, a rare dweller of the deep waters.
The museum's history has a dramatic chapter. In 1943 bombs and a fire that lasted three days destroyed half of the building and a good part of the collections. What saved it was the bequest of a Milanese doctor, Vittorio Ronchetti.
After the war the building was rebuilt as it was, and the facade was finished in 1956 with the statues and pinnacles.
Among its treasures is a famous fossil, a baby dinosaur called Ciro. He lives here, together with a life-size reconstructed triceratops, the cast of a tyrannosaur and the original skeletons of an allosaur and a gryposaur.
The museum was born in 1838, when the collector Giuseppe De Cristoforis and the botanist Giorgio Jan donated their collections to the city. The first director was Jan himself. It is the oldest civic museum in Milan.
The building is the work of Giovanni Ceruti, and was built between 1888 and 1893: the first museum architecture in Italy made expressly to be a museum. The model is the Natural History Museum in London.
The museum tells the story of the Earth on the raised ground floor: mineralogy, paleontology, the origin and evolution of plants and animals, up to the natural history of humankind. On the first floor is zoology.
Don't miss the 83 dioramas, the world's natural environments rebuilt at full scale, from savannas to tropical forests, from deserts to Antarctica. The first, from 1965, has an anaconda.
Also don't miss the dinosaur hall, and among the rarities a giant clam, one of the ten largest in the world, and the cetacean hall, with the beaked whale, a rare dweller of the deep waters.
The museum's history has a dramatic chapter. In 1943 bombs and a fire that lasted three days destroyed half of the building and a good part of the collections. What saved it was the bequest of a Milanese doctor, Vittorio Ronchetti.
After the war the building was rebuilt as it was, and the facade was finished in 1956 with the statues and pinnacles.