Why you should experience Museo dei Bambini Milano in Milan, Italy.
Museo dei Bambini Milano is an inventive children's cultural center where Porta Vittoria's eighteenth-century architecture, experimental education, creative play and Milan's long investment in design converge inside a former hospital cemetery transformed for new generations.
Set along Via Enrico Besana near Viale Regina Margherita and just steps from Corso XXII Marzo, the museum occupies the deconsecrated church at the center of the Rotonda della Besana, a late Baroque complex begun for the Ospedale Maggiore in 1695 before changing repeatedly from burial ground to hospital property, exhibition venue and public garden. Children now move through an eighteenth-century church surrounded by a 7,100-square-meter garden and the sinuous brick portico that once enclosed the hospital dead. Interactive installations privilege touching, building, testing and direct participation, continuing an educational philosophy developed by MUBA through decades of temporary projects before it acquired a permanent home. The result is a children's cultural center where one of Milan's most unusual architectural survivals has become a place for experimentation without erasing the radically different purpose for which the enclosure was built.
What you should know about Museo dei Bambini Milano.
Museo dei Bambini Milano is best known for spending nearly two decades developing traveling interactive exhibitions before securing its permanent home at the Rotonda della Besana in January 2014. The project originated in 1995 from a small group of professionals seeking to create a dedicated children's museum for Milan, with public programming beginning in 1997 and the organization becoming a nonprofit foundation in 2007. Thirteen major interactive exhibitions followed before the permanent museum opened, and its educational projects traveled through more than 50 cities in Italy and Europe, reaching nearly 800,000 children, half through school groups. One particularly consequential period unfolded at Triennale Milano, where MUBA developed exhibitions including the 2008 Vietato non toccare with Associazione Bruno Munari and Corraini, translating Bruno Munari's experiments with books, touch and childhood creativity into a physical route for children aged two through six. A second strand arrived in 2010 when MUBA joined the REMIDA network, extending a Reggio Emilia project founded in 1996 around creative experimentation with industrial scraps. The long search for a permanent institution ended when Fondazione MUBA secured an eight-year concession, extendable by another six, for more than 1,200 square meters inside the Rotonda della Besana. The permanent center opened on January 23, 2014 with Scatole, an installation built around volume, three-dimensional form and perception, converting an organization previously distributed across temporary venues into a stable Milanese cultural institution.
The building MUBA inherited had already undergone an extraordinary succession of uses before children entered its former church. The Ospedale Maggiore began constructing a new burial complex here in 1695 after its existing sepulchral capacity became inadequate, and the first interments took place in July 1697. San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri developed at the center, followed from 1719 by the great surrounding portico associated with Francesco Croce and Francesco Raffagno, whose completion in 1731 was aided financially by silk merchant Giambattista Annone. Approximately 150,000 people were buried beneath the complex before its funerary role ended during the late eighteenth century. Luigi Cagnola subsequently prepared an unrealized 1809 scheme to convert the former cemetery into a Pantheon for the Kingdom of Italy, after which the enclosure passed through uses including barracks, warehouse, hospital laundry and a hospital for chronically ill patients. Around 5,000 patients were treated there during the 1870 to 1871 smallpox epidemic, adding another medical chapter to ground already inseparable from the Ospedale Maggiore. Milan eventually converted the enclosure into a public garden and cultural venue, and a major conservation campaign from 2010 to 2012 preceded MUBA's arrival. The cemetery, epidemic hospital, cultural venue and children's museum form an unusually complete progression in the reuse of a place originally created around death and eventually devoted to childhood.
How to fold Museo dei Bambini Milano into your trip.
Museo dei Bambini Milano works as the anchor for a daytime progression through Milanese Art Nouveau experimentation, the vanished wholesale food economy of Porta Vittoria and a Napoleonic music institution that became one of Italy's principal conservatories.
Begin at Casa Campanini, the Via Bellini residence Alfredo Campanini designed for himself between 1904 and 1906 as a highly personal experiment in Milanese Art Nouveau. Two immense female figures by Michele Vedani flank the entrance, and Alessandro Mazzucotelli executed wrought iron decoration designed by Campanini, extending the architect's authorship from the building into its ornamental detail. Treccani describes the house as a field for Campanini's technical experimentation, making the surviving interiors and exterior sculpture particularly revealing evidence of an architect testing his own approach on his home. Continue to Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini in 1908 for the fruit-and-vegetable market that moved from the Verziere to this district in 1911. Farmers and merchants from across Lombardy traded around the pavilion until the wholesale market departed for Via Lombroso in 1965, leaving Migliorini's floral-tiled, iron-windowed building as the principal architectural survivor. Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune occupied it from 1974 to 1980, turning a former commercial meeting place into an important center for participatory theater decades before the building received their names in 2017. Conclude at Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, established by Napoleonic decree in 1807 and inaugurated on September 3, 1808 within the former collegiate buildings adjoining Santa Maria della Passione. Its first generation included teachers such as Alessandro Rolla, Bonifazio Asioli, Luigi Belloli and Benedetto Carulli, and the institution began with only 24 free boarding places before expanding into a major center of musical training. The progression moves from Campanini using his own residence as an architectural laboratory through Migliorini's market pavilion passing from food commerce to Fo and Rame's theater into a Napoleonic school sustaining more than two centuries of musical education, surrounding Museo dei Bambini Milano with three distinct traditions of experimentation.
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