Among the most important naturalistic museums in Europe, the Civic Museum of Natural History of Milan was founded in 1838, when the Municipality accepted the donation of the private naturalistic museum of the collector Giuseppe De Cristoforis and the botanist Giorgio Jan. The structure officially opened at public six years later, on the occasion of the VI Congress of Italian Scientists which was carrying out its work in Milan that year.
 
The building in which the museum is located was built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries to a design by the architect Giovanni Ceruti (1842-1907), inside the Public Gardens of Porta Venezia. This is the first Italian museum architecture, in a national panorama full of monumental buildings transformed over time into museum locations. The neo-Gothic style of the building refers to the great success of the new building of the British Museum Natural History in London; while the ring plan - cut from a central body - faithfully reproduces the choice made for the new headquarters of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. Today the museum has 23 showrooms (on approximately 5,500 m²) spread over two floors and an attic, and preserves almost three million pieces. It also has the largest exhibition of dioramas in Italy (about a hundred).