National Mountain Museum

The “Duca degli Abruzzi” National Mountain Museum is located in Turin, on the side of the church and convent of Monte dei Cappuccini, in a panoramic position from which you can admire a long stretch of the Alps and the underlying city.

The idea of ​​setting up a museum was born in 1874 among the first members of the Italian Alpine Club which had been born in the same city for a decade.

Currently the Museum operates, with a wide and varied activity, both nationally and internationally. It wants to be a cultural pole that ideally unites, in all respects, the mountains of the whole world.

Then, following the intended purpose, temporary exhibitions are added to the fixed museographic set-up. The Museum, however, was born with much narrower horizons, and it was its merit to know how to grow and improve progressively; the salient points can be briefly summarized in a fairly limited series of events.

The first nucleus of the Museum was born in 1874, on the initiative of the first members of the Italian Alpine Club, with the creation of an Alpine lookout and an observatory. The current visit route is the result of a restructuring started on the threshold of 2000.

The rooms house collections and objects of material culture, linked to themes such as religion, communications, tourism and mountaineering, the Italian Alpine Club, skiing, winter sports and sustainable development. The tour ends on an external panoramic terrace from which it is possible to admire 400 kilometers of Alps.

The Museum also includes an exhibition space dedicated to temporary exhibitions, in which the collections of the Museum usually kept in the archives are exhibited in rotation.

The Second World War seriously damaged the new Museum.

Despite the damage suffered, the exhibition was partially rearranged in the following year and the Museum opened on holidays.

In the 1950s, decisive action was taken to redevelop the exhibition spaces; the old installations, with alterations and replacements, lasted until the beginning of 1966 when the council of the Turin Section of the Italian Alpine Club, following an inspection, took the decision to dismantle all the exhibition structures in order to be able to intervene with a general renovation of the premises and to re-prepare a new exhibition floor.

Today the Monte dei Cappuccini is a true cultural center dedicated to the mountains, divided into three separate but complementary structures, one dedicated to meetings, one to documentation and one to exhibitions.

Map: National Mountain Museum