Thematic arrangement
Childhood, death, adornment, belief โ cultures compared in one room.
Pietroarco โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Pietroarco โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Pietroarco โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Francesco Bini โ CC BY-SA 4.0
For anyone interested in ethnography yes; otherwise Milan's priorities are the Duomo, the Brera gallery, the Last Supper and the Sforza castle. This is a specialist museum outside the centre, so make it a second or third visit.
It is far smaller than the great collections in Paris, Berlin and Leiden, and narrower in scope. Its advantage is that the presentation is modern and thematic, which makes it easier to read than halls packed with thousands of objects. Go for legibility rather than comprehensiveness.
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An ethnographic museum in western Milan whose collection was formed from what Italian missionaries sent back from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania over more than a century. That origin should be clear because it defines the collection's nature: the objects were gathered in a missionary context, that is, in an unequal relationship between collector and the society they came from. The museum itself addresses this in its contemporary presentation rather than ignoring it, which is worth noting. The displays are masks, figures, textiles, ritual objects and dress from New Guinea, China, Japan, the Amazon and central Africa. The presentation is modern and arranged thematically rather than geographically: childhood, death, adornment, belief โ which makes comparison between distant cultures possible in the same room. It lies west of the centre and needs a metro or tram. A mid-sized museum with limited hours and a weekly closing day, with part of the space given to temporary exhibitions.
Childhood, death, adornment, belief โ cultures compared in one room.
New Guinea, China, Japan, the Amazon and central Africa.
The museum raises the question of how the objects were gathered rather than avoiding it.
West Milan, the missionary institute