Peoples and Cultures Museum - PIME

The Peoples and Cultures Museum was founded in 1910 thanks to the work of PIME missionaries with the name of "Indo-Chinese Ethnographic Museum".

The Peoples and Cultures Museum is dedicated to the knowledge of extra-European cultures and houses a composite collection of goods that come from Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America.

The museum is located in the spaces of the Pime Center in Milan in via Monte Rosa and from September 2019 it presents itself with an entirely renovated setting that includes multimedia stations designed to actively involve visitors and make the contents of the museum accessible and easily usable.

The collections are arranged according to thematic strands that range from the great Asian philosophical and religious traditions to everyday objects.

The first collections of the Peoples and Cultures Museum were brought to Italy by Fr. Carlo Salerio, who left in 1852 for Papua New Guinea with the first expedition of what would later become the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME). Of that first collection, however, only a few pieces were saved, since almost all of them were destroyed due to the aerial bombardments of Milan in 1943.

The archive photos give us the image of a museum full of unusual objects and stuffed animals, destined to amaze the visitor and transport him into the exotic atmosphere that at that time the imagination attributed to distant countries. From that moment on, the museum will follow a long path of evolution, both in the setting up and in the exhibition purposes, which will lead it in 1994 to take the current name of Museo Popoli e Culture, to emphasize the attention towards people and relations.