Anima Mundi, the Vatican museum that looks beyond Europe

Anima Mundi is the museum almost nobody realises is inside the Vatican Museums. It’s down in the basement, well away from the line running from the Pio Clementino to the Sistine, and it holds something you don’t expect in the house of Raphael and Michelangelo, sacred and everyday objects from peoples on five continents. For me it’s among the most rewarding parts of the complex for a second visit or a trip with children, and here’s why. If you’re still sorting out the basics, see [the Vatican Museums in three hours] first(/en/vatican-city/vatican-museums/).

An exhibition that turned into a museum

It all began with the 1925 Jubilee. Pius XI wanted a Missionary Exhibition in the Vatican to show how far the missions reached and, at the same time, the cultural, artistic and spiritual traditions of every people. Missionaries acted as go-betweens and the response was huge. The show opened on 24 December 1924, closed on 9 January 1926, drew more than a million people and filled twenty-six pavilions with over 100,000 works.

Its success won the pope over. On 12 November 1926 he founded an Ethnological Museum, which opened at the Lateran on 21 December 1927 with some 80,000 pieces chosen from the exhibition. In 1963 it had to close because the palace went to the Diocese of Rome, and the collection sat in storage until 1973, when Paul VI gave it a home inside the Vatican Museums.

What changed in 2019?

The museum has been rebuilt piece by piece. In 2019 the first areas of the new Anima Mundi opened, with Mater Amazonia and Oceania, and Pope Francis came to inaugurate them on 18 October. He called it a living house, open to all, with its doors flung wide to the peoples of the world. The Americas and Africa followed in December 2022, and Asia is now in preparation, including a Forest of Buddhas to compare Buddhist statues from across the continent.

What I like most is how things are shown. In Oceania the objects seem to hang in mid-air, with none of the storeroom feel so many ethnographic museums used to have. There’s also deeper work going on, which the website describes in detail, tracing the descendants of the people who sent each piece in 1925 to give them back its story. The current curator, Nadia Fiussello, is the first woman to run the museum.

Poles that are left to rot

If you only take in one part, make it Oceania. Pukumani funeral poles are carved by the Tiwi of Melville Island for the ceremonies that follow a death, with dances and songs, and once those are over the poles are left to decay. According to the museums, the ones with heads represent women and the ones with arms represent men. The Vatican’s set was made for display and ranks among the oldest kept in any museum in the world.

Close by are the stones of the Wandjina Song Cycle, painted around 1913 by Paul Miuron at a mission in Australia’s Kimberley as a gift for the pope. The museums present them as the first time an Aboriginal artist carried the world of his homeland onto something portable, a world that until then lived in rock paintings.

What else the collection holds

The collection runs past 80,000 objects and spans the Palaeolithic to the present. Among the pieces the website singles out are a South African stone tool about two million years old, a Qing court crown made with kingfisher feathers, a Mexica feathered serpent, a samurai suit of armour from the Shimazu clan and a Kota reliquary guardian from Gabon. The website doesn’t say which of these are on display right now, so I wouldn’t make a beeline for any of them.

Where it fits in a day at the museums

I’d give it around twenty minutes and pair it with the Carriage Pavilion, which is on the same level. With children, those two stops beat any marble gallery, and I’ve got more ideas in the Vatican with kids. Watch out for Tuesday 29 September 2026, when the museum is shut from 08:00 to 11:30. To place it, look for number 21 on the Vatican Museums map.