Milan Natural History Museum

Milan Natural History Museum tickets, with the audio guide

The Milan Natural History Museum stands in what the museum calls the first building in Italy designed to be a museum, put up between 1892 and 1907 on the model of the great natural history museums of Europe.

€16.50 buys a timed entry, and it comes with a digital audio guide in English, French, German or Italian, with more than 40 stops and a map of the rooms, plus a self-guided walk around the city for afterwards. You can cancel up to 24 hours before your time.

The booked time matters at weekends and on holidays, when the museum warns that it can’t guarantee entry to people who just turn up. Arrive on time, but not more than five minutes early, with your booking on your phone or printed.

If your dates fall on the first Sunday of the month, entry is free for everyone, and on the second Tuesday it’s free for anyone under 25.

Dinosaurs and dioramas: inside the Natural History Museum

The museum has 23 rooms. Eleven are on the ground floor, among them Room 7, where four dinosaur models stand, and the other twelve are upstairs, given over to animals and the great natural environments of the world, along with the old lecture hall.

The dioramas are what the museum does best, and it has more of them than anywhere else in Italy. Each one rebuilds a habitat in three dimensions, and since the displays were renewed in the 1970s, the rooms have been arranged around ecology, animal behaviour and evolution.

Every room has panels and labels, so you could manage without the audio guide, which adds a spoken commentary. Between them, the rooms cover the museum’s five collections: minerals, fossils, animals, plants and insects.

Natural History Museum opening hours and step-free access

The ticket desk closes an hour before the museum does, at 16:30; with a ticket already booked, you can go in until 17:00.

The main entrance has twelve steps, with a stairlift that staff operate. For step-free access, go in by the large gate on Via Palestro, about 150 metres from the main door, and follow the partly unpaved path to the lift on the right side of the building.

The Natural History Museum on a YesMilano pass, without using a premium pick

Both YesMilano passes include the museum as one of the six civic museums. You still book a day and time in the app.

For the rest of what the passes cover, see Milan Pass and Milan’s city passes.

Milan’s oldest civic museum, rebuilt after 1943

The museum was founded in 1838, when the nobleman Giuseppe De Cristoforis and the botanist Giorgio Jan gave the city their collections, and Jan became its first director. It opened in September 1844 in a former convent, Santa Marta.

The building you visit was designed by Giovanni Ceruti. In 1943 an Anglo-American air raid set it on fire and destroyed important collections, among them Jan’s plants and reptiles and many of the fossils. The first rooms reopened in 1952.

Porta Venezia and Palestro, the stops for the Giardini Pubblici

The museum is at Corso Venezia 55, inside the Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli, with two metro stops on the red M1 within a few minutes’ walk.

The Planetarium, its neighbour in the gardens, is separate: neither our ticket nor the passes cover it. From Palestro it’s a five-minute walk to Villa Necchi Campiglio, the 1930s villa with the pool.