With the official opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) on the Pyramids Plateau now set for 1 November, there is still just time to take in a visit to one of Europe’s largest and oldest Egyptological museums — the Museo Egizio in the northern Italian city of Turin.
While many people today may associate Turin more with Italy’s motor industry since it is the headquarters of the Italian marque Fiat or with the famous Turin Shroud, a piece of cloth kept in Turin Cathedral believed to bear the imprint of the crucified Jesus, the city is also home to an important Egyptological collection dating back to at least the early 19th century.
It was founded even in advance of the better-known collections in the Paris Louvre Museum or the British Museum in London, and it can claim to be not only one of the world’s most important collections of Ancient Egyptian artefacts but also probably its first major public collection and the first to be presented as the record of an important ancient civilisation rather than simply a set of curiosities.
It has always had an important research and educational function, and this is continued in the museum’s splendidly appointed galleries, temporary exhibitions, and educational and research programmes today.
Housed in the Academy of Sciences building in the historic centre of Turin a stone’s throw away from the magnificent Piazza Castello and former palace of the Italians monarchs when they were resident in Turin, the museum was founded on the basis of two royal collections.
In 1759, King Charles Emmanuel III of what was then the northern Italian state of Piedmont (at the time Savoy and Sardinia) commissioned a collecting mission to Egypt to acquire Ancient Egyptian items for his personal collection. He wanted to provide company for the so-called Mensa Isaica, a bronze altar table probably made in Rome in the 1st century CE for a temple of the Ancient Egyptian goddess Isis that had found its way into the collection of the dukes of the Italian city state of Mantua in the early 16th century and from there to the royal house of Savoy.
Nearly three quarters of a century later, during which Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 expedition to Egypt had brought down the Egyptian Mameluke regime, King Charles Felix of Savoy acquired thousands of artefacts collected by French consul Bernardino Drovetti in Egypt, with these becoming the core of one of Europe’s most important Egyptological collections.
So important was the Turin collection, built up by these royal collecting activities and other acquisitions, that French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion, famous for deciphering Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s, worked at the Turin Museum on artefacts that helped him in his studies. The Drovetti collection in particular, acquired for the then enormous sum of 400,000 Sardinian lire, meant that over 5,300 Ancient Egyptian artefacts arrived at the new museum and that, in Champollion’s words, “the road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin.”
Many of these items can be seen at the Turin Museum today, even if its exhibition space, generous at some 60,000 square metres divided over four floors, is still not large enough to present more than a fraction of the 40,000 or so artefacts it is believed to contain.
Arriving in Turin by train on a tour through northern Italy for a visit to the museum, Al-Ahram Weekly party was at first disconcerted to find itself at the wrong railway station. It turns out that Italy’s high-speed trains do not use the splendid 19th-century station in the centre of Turin, clearly visible at one end of the axis that leads from the station through the historic centre to the former royal palace and gardens, but another more modern one, far less splendid, some miles away.
However, once this initial glitch had been corrected, it was easy to locate the Egyptian Museum, perhaps today the city’s most important single tourist attraction. Signposted throughout the city centre, all or most of which has been pedestrianised, the museum is housed in Turin’s suitably magnificent Academy of Sciences building, which it has occupied since its foundation two centuries ago.
When the Weekly visited over the summer this year, the building was undergoing a thorough overhaul, as were some of the areas occupied by the collection. However, this made it a good deal easier to identify, since yellow tarpaulins had been strapped to the scaffolding erected against the main facades during the ongoing renovation, inviting visitors into the building and with the Museum’s Arabic signage clearly visible.
It turned out that this was also a feature of the presentation of the collection, since throughout the museum the main explanatory and interpretative material is prominently presented in Arabic, as well as Italian and English, in what may be a first among all the world Egyptological museums visited in this series.
Inside the Museum: On the ground floor of the museum, more or less opposite the entrance, visitors find themselves in a gallery presenting materials such as wood, pottery, pigments, and stone, all used by the Ancient Egyptians in creating the artefacts that have come down to us but rarely focused on in their own right.
This makes for an unusual introduction to the larger collection, even if it is probably the result of the ongoing renovation, asking visitors to consider features of Ancient Egyptian artefacts that might otherwise be overlooked. Various pigments were used to make the paints used on Ancient Egyptian coffins, for example, and all of these had to be produced from locally available materials.
Ancient Egypt, like modern Egypt today, also had little wood, both overall and in terms of different species, and the wood used to make coffins and furniture, examples of which are of course well-known from various royal and non-royal tombs, would have had to be imported from what are now Palestine and Lebanon.
The collection itself is arranged chronologically and starts with the Ancient Egyptian Pre-Dynastic Period and Old Kingdom upstairs on the second floor. Rooms two to five take visitors from the earliest periods of Ancient Egyptian history to the beginnings of the New Kingdom in around 1570 BCE, with the artefacts being presented both chronologically and by category, textiles, for example, or a mezzanine open-storage area dedicated to pottery.
As is almost always the case in the modern study of Ancient Egypt, the vast majority of the material that has come down to us can appear to be both death-directed, in the sense that it focuses on the afterlife and was originally found in tombs, and from mostly desert areas of Upper Egypt since the wetter climate of Lower Egypt and the Delta did not provide the conditions that would have allowed for its conservation.
Some of the artefacts in these galleries are identified as being of particular importance because they provide information about social structures at particular points in Ancient Egyptian history or about developments in religion, aesthetics, or technology. The tomb of Iti and his wife Nefuru, for example, reconstructed in this part of the museum, was discovered at the beginning of the last century at Gebelein (Naga El-Gherira) south of Luxor in Upper Egypt, and visitors can view both the often astonishingly well-preserved grave goods taken from this tomb and its elaborate wall paintings.
As the accompanying wall texts note, nothing is known about the owners of the tomb, believed to be that of a high-ranking official and his wife who lived during the First Intermediate Period (2118-1980 BCE), aside from what they selected to take with them to the afterlife. Neferu took her necklaces and cosmetics with her as if preparing for a short vacation.
The wall paintings in the tomb, the wall texts add, extensive both in terms of the number of scenes portrayed and the area that they covered, can tell us much about developments in funerary practices among the Ancient Egyptian elite during this period as well as about the care that the Ancient Egyptian artists took in observing and reproducing agricultural and food-production practices and scenes of hunting and fishing.
Overall, the presentation goes to considerable lengths both to explain the objects on display, typically captioning them in Italian and English, as well as, at least for the larger framing material, in Arabic, and to detail the circumstances of their discovery and the conditions under which they were shipped to Europe. This could have been as a result of excavation, purchase, including from local and foreign antiquities merchants, or as part of other major collections that have found their way into the Turin Museum, among them the Drovetti collection.
This emphasis continues on the floor below, where the chronological presentation continues from the New Kingdom to the Late and Ptolemaic Periods. Unlike in the case of the Iti and Neferu tomb, where its discoverer, Virginio Rosa, kept detailed notes about the original placing of the artefacts and provided a photographic record of most of them, little is known about the provenance of most of the pieces in this part of the collection since they were mostly collected by Drovetti in the early 19th century who mostly purchased them on the then uncontrolled antiquities market.
The labelling in this part of the museum admits this, noting that most of the artefacts would have come from the area of Thebes but that other information is unrecoverable. The galleries contain material bearing witness to the lives of the artisans who once lived in the Ancient Egyptian village of Deir Al-Medina near Luxor, home to the workmen who dug and the artists who decorated the nearby royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, as well as from later excavations carried out by the Turin Museum, notably under its dynamic early 20th-century director Ernest Schiaparelli.
Schiaparelli oversaw 12 excavation campaigns in Egypt between 1903 and 1920, including in Deir Al-Medina and the Valley of the Queens at Luxor. Items from these excavations are on display in the museum, perhaps most spectacularly artefacts found in the tomb of Kha and his wife Merit that was discovered near Deir Al-Medina in February 1906. This tomb, the richest and most complete non-royal tomb ever found, dates from the late 18th Dynasty, and materials found in it take up an entire room at the Turin Museum.
Returning to the ground floor, visitors can visit the Gallery of the Kings, a special collection of oversized statues of Ancient Egyptian gods and pharaohs, and, one floor further down, a presentation of the history of the Museum itself. The Gallery of the Kings, recently redesigned with striking polished aluminium walls, contains the museum’s collection of sometimes colossal statues, most of them collected by Drovetti in Thebes in the early 19th century and one way or another shipped to Europe.
Perhaps even more striking than this gallery, however, and possibly even a unique feature of the Turin Museum, is the basement gallery detailing the history of the institution and its collection. While this is rather hidden away from visitors, who perhaps understandably concentrate on the chronological galleries on the first and second floors, it does a useful job of presenting the history of Egyptological collecting in Europe, from the almost entirely unregulated situation at the beginning of the 19th century to the expeditions run by Schiaparelli and others one hundred years later.
Drovetti and others benefitted from the archaeological free-for-all that characterised much of the Eastern Mediterranean in the early 19th century, this also being the period that saw the removal of the sculptures from the frieze of the Parthenon in Athens, the so-called “Elgin Marbles,” by the British Lord Elgin by 1812.
It was during the “Age of the Consuls,” the exhibition says, that individuals enjoying minor diplomatic protection were able to build significant Egyptological collections. Both Drovetti and the Englishman Henry Salt who collected Ancient Egyptian artefacts for the British Museum were European consuls.
It would be a pity if visitors to the Turin Museum missed out on this basement gallery about the history of the institution that usefully complements and contextualises the exemplary curation of the collection upstairs. Perhaps in future years its contents will be integrated into the main presentation.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: