Milan Natural History Museum

This guide to the Milan Natural History Museum traces the fire of August 1943, when wartime bombing destroyed the herbarium built by the museum's first director along with most of its paleontology collections. It follows what keepers managed to save from the flames, and the museum's slow reopening after Milan itself lay in rubble. Look for the Neo-Romanesque towers and terracotta facade, finished just before one war and rebuilt after the next.