Il Archaeological Museum of Turin retains the historic name of Museo di Antichità to emphasize the continuity of this historic institution.
Its origins date back to the mid-sixteenth century, with the collections of Duke Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, later expanded by Charles Emmanuel I and placed in the gallery specially created to house the ducal collections.
In 1723 Victor Amadeus II, King of Sardinia, entrusted the distinguished scholar Scipione Maffei with arranging the collection of tombstones which, together with the antiquities already in existence, was set up in the University Palace. During the nineteenth century, almost all the classical antiquities were transferred to the palace of the Academy of Sciences, where in the meantime an important collection of Egyptian artifacts had found a place: thus the Royal Museum of Greco-Roman and Egyptian Antiquities was born.
In 1940, with the definitive separation from the Egyptian Museum, the new Museum of Antiquities was born, which since 1982 has found an independent location in the nineteenth-century greenhouses of the Royal Palace, where the historic core of the collections is currently housed. The collections of Savoy antiquities, to which other prestigious donations and acquisitions were later added, allow the evolution of collecting tastes to be followed and testify to the growing interest in archaeology in Piedmont.
A new pavilion, created in 1998, houses the section of the Piedmont territory: along the exhibition route unfolds an ideal journey backwards in time, to encounter one after the other, as in archaeological excavation realities, the many and surprising testimonies of ancient Piedmont.
The underground floor of the New Wing of the Royal Palace constitutes an extraordinary connection with the archaeological area of the Roman theatre and is currently intended to host temporary exhibitions, pending the new rearrangement of the collections and the connection with the Royal Complex.
