The Giancarlo Ligabue Museum of Natural History in Venice hosts the exhibition " Miani 150. A journey to discover an explorer " from April until the end of December 2022 .

The Giancarlo Ligabue Museum of Natural History in Venice celebrates the 150th anniversary of the death of the explorer Giovanni Miani (1810/1872) with an extensive study project that starts from the preserved collection, of exceptional historical and scientific value. The multidisciplinary project takes place throughout the year 2022 with meetings, conferences and educational activities and the involvement of scholars and researchers and other cultural institutions. It also includes the digitization of his extensive paper production, testimony to the eclectic interests of the explorer, collector, musicologist, geographer, ethnographer Giovanni Miani.

Among the most evocative exhibition rooms of the Giancarlo Ligabue Museum of Natural History is the one dedicated to the ethnographic collection of the explorer Giovanni Miani, who in two distinct expeditions went in search of the sources of the Nile, whose origins were at that time shrouded in mystery . It is one of the oldest and most varied African ethnographic collections in Europe, with 1800 artifacts collected in the mid-nineteenth century in the current Sudanese territory, which were donated by the same explorer to the city of Venice. The collection was restored and offered to the public at the reopening of the Natural History Museum in 2010, with an installation designed by Miani himself, the first example of a museographic installation in the ethnographic field known in Europe. Today it becomes the main nucleus of the multidisciplinary census and study project, launched for the 150th anniversary of the explorer's death, which involves other Italian and European institutions that preserve materials and documents relating to the Miani collection (Pigorini Museum in Rome, Welt Museum in Vienna , Italian Geographic Society in Rome) and various scholars and researchers from different disciplines, given the eclectic nature of the figure and the collection. The value of the collection in fact transcends the ethnographic data and lends itself to different interpretations in the naturalistic, archaeological and anthropological fields.