The Natural History Museum is named after Giacomo Doria, who was its founder and director for over forty years.
The Giacomo Doria Natural History Museum was founded in Genoa in 1867 and is the oldest museum in the city.
Covering an area of 5,000 square metres, it contains 4.5 million exhibits and specimens from all over the world, of which there are about 6,000 on display.
The museum also holds workshops for children and temporary exhibitions.
Giacomo Doria Natural History Museum: what to see
The tour is a journey through the planet’s biodiversity : the varied animal, plant and mineral exhibits come from all over the world.
At the end of the 19th century, the Museum financed a series of trips to distant lands such as New Guinea, Burma and Sumatra, which were unexplored from a naturalistic point of view.
Among others, the captains Fea, D’Albertis and Loria left, who brought back millions of specimens of plants and animals preserved in alcohol.
The Museum became the most important National Museum for Insects, a supremacy that it unfortunately lost following the Second World War, even though it still has the largest entomological collection in Italy today (estimated at 4 million).
Today, the Giacomo Doria Natural History Museum exhibits more than 6,000 specimens – animals, plants, fossils, minerals – spread over 23 rooms on two floors.
On the ground floor, mammals of all orders can be seen; on the first floor there are birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish as well as insects, other invertebrates and minerals.
There is also a three-dimensional reconstruction of a cell enlarged 100,000 times!
Giacomo Doria Natural History Museum: Visiting information
Opening hours of the Natural History Museum
☛ from 1 November: Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 a.m. – 6:30 p.m. Closed: Mondays;
☛ from 18 April: Tuesday to Friday 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10:00 a.m. – 7:30 p.m.
In the event of ORANGE and RED hydrogeological warnings issued by the Civil Protection, the facility will be closed and scheduled events cancelled.
Natural History Museum tickets
5 euro adult, free 0/18 years (EU citizens). Reductions for the disabled and over 65s (3 euro).
Genoa City Card
If you want to visit other Museums in Genoa, it is convenient to buy the Card of the Museums of Genoa where public transport is also included.
Genoese Sunday
On Sundays by presenting their identity card, residents in the municipality of Genoa get in for free.
Address of the Natural History Museum
Via Brigata Liguria, 9 – 16121 Genova, Italy
tel. 0105578276
Giacomo Doria Natural History Museum with children
A visit to the Giacomo Doria Natural History Museum is interesting for the whole family and for all nature lovers.
Suitable for children aged 6/7 years, it could however also be fun for younger children, aged 3/4 years, to visit perhaps on a rainy day as we did.
You can enter with a pram and, apart from a few steps at the entrance, the museum is easy to get around and you can take the lift to move between floors.
On Saturdays and Sundays, the ADM Associazione Didattica Museale organises interesting workshops for children (booking required on their website), usually at 11am for children aged 3-5, and at 3pm for children aged 6-12.
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