The Museum is located within a 19th-century building in the Indro Montanelli Garden, near the historic city gate of Porta Venezia.

The museum is divided into five different permanent sections: Mineralogy (with a large collection of minerals from all over the world); Paleontology (with several fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistoric organisms); Natural History of Man (dedicated to the origins and evolution of humans with a particular attention to the relationship of the latter with the environment); Invertebrate Zoology (dedicated to mollusks, arthropods and entomology); and Vertebrate Zoology (dedicated to vertebrates, both exotic and European).

Among the most valuable pieces are a Spinosaurus snout, the skeletons of two pygmy elephants (Palaeoloxodon falconeri) from Sicily and the only existing fossil of the coelurosaurian theropod Scipionix samniticus.

[4] The natural history of man section is dedicated to the origins of humans from early primates to Homo sapiens.

Human evolution is described from the phylogenetic, morphological and ecological points of view with several archaeological objects and realistic plastic models.