CMV – Children's Museum Verona

About this place

In a city where a visitor spends the whole day forbidden to touch anything — Roman stone behind ropes, warning signs at every chapel — there is one place southwest of the centre built on the opposite principle: everything in it exists to be pushed, pulled and dunked in water. The Children's Museum Verona occupies about a thousand square metres over two floors inside the old general warehouses, an industrial complex inaugurated in 1927 for storing and chilling produce, whose landmark is the round cold-storage station of 1930, restored by the architect Mario Botta and standing empty again since Eataly gave it up in the summer of 2025. The museum itself opened in September 2019, then lost most of its first two years to pandemic closures. Inside it is zoned by age: corners for infants and under-threes, others for four to six, then for older children up to twelve. The centrepiece is a sixteen-metre run of water tanks with more than forty activities built around vortices, communicating vessels and water pressure; there is a coloured mechanical wall that only works if more than one child cooperates on it, a pneumatic wall where balls are steered through tubes, a light room about refraction and reflection, and an orange ball pit that swallows small children whole. Alongside sits the ThinkLab, a workshop space with bookable sessions in woodwork, mechanics, robotics and coding, run on the learning-by-doing tinkering method made famous by San Francisco's Exploratorium. Being honest about access matters more than any description here. The museum is not in the historic centre; it is about two and a half kilometres southwest of Piazza Bra and a twenty-minute walk — some 1.5 km — from Porta Nuova station, in a district of offices and warehouses that offers you nothing once you come out. There is no café inside, only vending machines, and nothing worth the name around it now that Eataly has left the Rotonda, so plan the family meal in town before or after. Entry runs in closed sessions of one hour and forty-five minutes with limited capacity, shoes come off at the door and everyone needs socks, and booking online is the sensible move, especially at weekends. One detail confuses most people: the child ticket (12 EUR) costs more than the adult one (11 EUR), and adults are not admitted at all unless accompanying a child. It is not on the Verona Card, and in winter it opens only in the afternoon from Tuesday to Friday, while Saturdays and Sundays run all day. The verdict is simple. If your children are under twelve and Verona has given you rain or July heat, this is two hours that buy their patience for the rest of the trip, with a large free car park you will not find near the centre. If they are older, or you are travelling without children, skip it without regret — there is nothing here for adults but the pleasure of watching their own kids. And for anyone weighing it against Gardaland, the difference is scale rather than quality: this is a miniature day in an air-conditioned hall that runs all year, that is a full one under the sun but shut from January until late March.