The Peoples and Cultures Museum was founded in 1910 thanks to the work of PIME missionaries with the name of "Indo-Chinese Ethnographic Museum".

The Peoples and Cultures Museum is dedicated to the knowledge of non-European cultures and houses a composite collection of goods from Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America.

The museum is located in the spaces of the Pime Center headquarters in Milan in via Monte Rosa and from September 2019 it presents itself with a completely renovated layout which includes multimedia stations designed to actively involve visitors and make the contents of the museum accessible and easily usable.

The collections are arranged according to thematic themes that range from the great Asian philosophical and religious traditions to everyday objects.

The first collections of the Peoples and Cultures Museum were brought to Italy by P. Carlo Salerio, who left for Papua New Guinea in 1852 with the first expedition of what would later become the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME). However, only a few pieces of that first collection were saved, as almost all were destroyed due to the air raids on Milan in 1943.

The archive photos give us the image of a museum full of unusual objects and stuffed animals, destined to amaze the visitor and transport him to the exotic atmosphere that in those times the imagination attributed to distant countries. From that moment on the museum will follow a long path of evolution, both in its layout and in its exhibition purposes, which will lead it to take its current name of Museum of Peoples and Cultures in 1994, to underline the attention towards people and relations.