Photo: FrussiWMI · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

MUDEC - Museo delle Culture

Civic museum of world cultures in a former Ansaldo factory, with the municipality's non-European collections and a permanent display on the world as seen from Milan.

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About the museum

In the early 1990s the Comune di Milano (municipality of Milan) bought the site of the former Ansaldo workshops in the Porta Genova area, to turn it into a multidisciplinary cultural hub that was also to house the city's non-European collections, until then kept at the Castello Sforzesco. An international competition launched in 1999 was won the following year by the studio of David Chipperfield, architect of the building of about 17,000 square metres on two floors, with visitor services on the ground floor and the exhibition route on the first floor, around the covered square known as the Agorà.

The non-European collections had originated in 1838 in the Museo civico di storia naturale (Civic Museum of Natural History) and had grown from the early twentieth century at the Castello Sforzesco. The bombing of August 1943 damaged them, and for decades they remained in storage, shown only in temporary exhibitions. Today the heritage exceeds 9,000 objects from all continents.

The museum opened in 2015, to coincide with Expo 2015. The permanent collection was presented on 28 October 2015 under the title “Oggetti d'incontro”; a second display, “Milano Globale. Il mondo visto da qui”, opened on 16 September 2021. The museum belongs to the Comune di Milano, while the temporary exhibitions are organised by the Comune and the concession holder 24 ORE Cultura. Since 2022 it also houses the Area Museo delle Culture, Progetti interculturali e Arte nello Spazio Pubblico.