A sprawling nuclear bunker near Verona, Italy — once a NATO headquarters known as West Star — is set to be converted into a Cold War museum, with part of the site due to open to the public by summer 2027.

The project carries a price tag of €7 million in funding and is expected to eventually draw roughly 100,000 visitors per year, according to The Art Newspaper. Exhibits will include original equipment from the Cold War era, offering a physical record of the decades when the bunker was an active military installation. ARTnews confirmed the conversion plan in a report published on 7 August 2026.

West Star was built to serve as a NATO command centre, a fortified underground site from which Allied operations in southern Europe could have been coordinated in the event of nuclear conflict. The exact date of its construction has not been specified in the published reports, but the bunker's role as a NATO headquarters places it firmly within the Cold War period, which ran from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. Its conversion into a museum would turn a sealed military facility into a space the public can walk through and read as primary evidence of that era.

Italy already has several smaller Cold War museums, The Art Newspaper noted, including the Bunker Museum in Dobbiaco, near the Austrian border, which opened as a museum in 2023. The West Star project would operate on a larger scale — both in physical footprint and in projected visitor numbers — than those existing sites.

The plan to preserve and display the bunker rather than seal or demolish it follows a broader pattern across Europe, where decommissioned military and government sites have been repurposed as cultural venues. The approach treats the structures themselves as historical documents: the layout of rooms, the thickness of walls and the surviving hardware all become part of the story.

For visitors, that means walking through the same corridors where NATO personnel once worked beneath layers of reinforced concrete, seeing the communications equipment and infrastructure as they were left — or as they have been recovered and staged for display. No opening date beyond the partial opening in summer 2027 has been announced, and the full scope of the completed museum has not yet been detailed in published reports.

What is clear is the scale of the ambition. A €7 million investment, a former NATO headquarters and a projection of 100,000 annual visitors place the West Star project among the more substantial adaptive-reuse museum ventures currently underway in Europe. Whether it reaches those numbers will depend on what the curators do with the space — and on how many people want to step inside a bunker that was built to survive the worst.