Museo di Storia Naturale di Milano

Founded in 1838 with the donation of the natural history collections of Giuseppe De Cristoforis and Giorgio Jan, the Natural History Museum is Milan's oldest civic museum. The building is located in the 'Indro Montanelli' Public Gardens and was built between 1892 and 1907 to a design by architect Giovanni Ceruti inspired by the great European nature museums of the second half of the 19th century.
The Museum holds more than 4.5 million specimens, which mainly make up the research and study collections, as well as being displayed to some extent along the exhibition route, which is divided into 23 rooms on two floors.
The exhibits open with the recently refurbished Mineralogy room, followed by the Palaeontology room, beginning with an explanation of how organic remains are preserved. The tour continues by illustrating the origin of vertebrates, from the evolution of fish to the transition of amphibians to land, to the conquest of the air, water and land environments by reptiles. The section concludes with rooms telling the natural history of man. The last two rooms on the ground floor illustrate the Zoology of Invertebrates: molluscs, in particular their shells, crustaceans and insects.
On the first floor, the tour continues with the Zoology of Vertebrates and the presentation of natural environments in Italy and around the world (marine ecosystems; tropical forests and wetlands; temperate forests, taiga and mountains; Arctic and Antarctic environments and marine mammals; savannahs, prairies and deserts), through spectacular dioramas, unique in their kind.
The specialist library open to the public has 160,000 volumes, special collections (archives and papers), historical catalogues of museum collections and over 3,200 scientific journals. There is a bookshop.