The Egyptian Museum of Turin, founded by Carlo Felice of Savoy in 1824 with the acquisition of the collection of the French consul in Egypt, the Piedmontese Bernardino Drovetti, and later enriched by the excavations of Ernesto Schiapparelli, is second only to that of Cairo, Egypt.
Egyptian Museum: what to see
The Egyptian Museum of Turin, like that of Cairo, is exclusively dedicated to the art and culture of ancient Egypt. Many internationally renowned scholars, starting with the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Jean-François Champollion, who arrived in Turin in 1824, have since dedicated themselves to studying its collections.
The Egyptian Museum (properly the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities) consists of a set of collections built up over time, to which must be added finds from excavations carried out in Egypt by the Italian Archaeological Mission between 1900 and 1935. At that time, the rule was that archaeological finds were divided between Egypt and the archaeological missions. The current rule is that artifacts remain in Egypt.
The museum’s headquarters have since been in the building that in the 17th century the architect Guarino Guarini built as a Jesuit school, known as the “Collegio dei Nobili”, which became the seat of the Academy of Sciences in the 18th century.
Among the most prestigious pieces of the Egyptian Museum of Turin are the rock-cut temple of Ellesija; the Gold Mines Papyrus; the Djoser reliefs; the painted cloth of Gebelein; the intact tomb of Kha and Merit; statues of the goddesses Isis and Sekhmet and that of Ramses II, discovered by Vitaliano Donati in the temple of the goddess Mut at Karnak; the Iliac table that the House of Savoy obtained from the Gonzaga in the 17th century; and the Royal Canon, known as the Turin Papyrus, one of the most important sources about the sequence of Egyptian rulers.
The Egyptian Museum of Turin is the most important in Italy, followed by that of Florence, and is housed in the 17th-century palace of the Academy, which also hosts the Sabauda Gallery.
Egyptian Museum: visit duration
Upon purchasing the admission ticket, each visitor will receive a video guide, a next-generation device offering the opportunity to choose visit routes differentiated by content and duration (e.g., The Masterpieces of the Egyptian Museum 120’ – Daily Life, Deir el Medina and Tomb of Kha 90’, etc.).
