The Museo Nazionale della Montagna “Duca degli Abruzzi” – CAI Turin is located on Monte dei Cappuccini, in an extraordinary panoramic position from which you can admire over 400 km of Alps and the city below.
The idea of setting up a museum was born in 1874 among the first members of the Italian Alpine Club, born in the city in 1863.Today the Museomontagna is a cultural pole that ideally unites, in all respects, the mountains of the world, through a wide and composite activity carried out at national and international level.

It is divided into three separate but complementary sectors:

• Exhibition Area, with permanent exhibition, temporary exhibitions, the Olympic courtyard, the Alpine Lookout and the Panoramic Terrace;
• Documentation Area, with the Museomontagna Documentation Centre, the CAI National Library, the Historic Film and Video Libraries, the CISDAE Archive – Italian Documentation Study Centre for Outside Europe Mountaineering;
• Meeting Area, with the historic Sala degli Stemmi and the conference rooms for meetings, in addition to the usual CAI Turin activities; the Restaurant.

The rich program of temporary exhibitions is one of the central elements of the Museum’s activity, in the broader work of conservation, study, enhancement and dissemination of mountain culture. The exhibitions – often created in collaboration with other organizations, including international ones – born and develop through different lines of research: from sociology to ethnography, from the history of mountaineering and exploration to architecture, from art to science. In particular, in recent years, the Museum has increased its activity aimed at the contemporary, with exhibitions and events that are part of a dedicated project that is developed through several lines of intervention, one of the main ones being the Sustainability Program aimed at the environmental theme.

The Museum has rich collections, partly preserved in its Documentation Area, open to consultation. Consisting of over 450,000 items, they are divided into the Documentation Centre (which brings together the Photo Library, the Iconographic Collections, the Mountaineering Archive, the Bonatti Archive and other personal collections), the CISDAE Archive and the Historic Film and Video Libraries. These archives, together with that of the CAI National Library, are gathered in the Documentation Area, to form a single documentation pole of the mountain that offers scholars, researchers or simple enthusiasts the opportunity to consult many documents, different by type of material, topic, chronology and provenance.
The Museum and the CAI National Library coordinate the CAISiDoc catalog – System of cultural heritage of the Italian Alpine Club where, in addition to the collections of the Museum and the Library, the collections of over 100 sectional libraries are published, thus constituting a single and shared catalog.

The Museomontagna is the headquarters and coordinator of the IAMF or International Alliance for Mountain Film and of the IMMA or International Mountain Museums Alliance, global networks for the conservation and promotion of sector cinema and for the enhancement of culture and museums of the mountains.