Imagine the year is 1630. Turin bustles with saber-wearing dukes, and just arriving in the city is a rather peculiar artifact: the Mensa Isiaca-a bronze tablet teeming with ancient symbols that set every local scholar’s heart racing and mind spinning. Even back then, people liked a good mystery! Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy snapped it up, and, well, he wasn’t shy about showing it off.
Curiosity grew, and soon a daring botanist-professor named Vitaliano Donati was sent off to Egypt. Picture him squinting under the desert sun, brush in hand, uncovering treasures like Ramses II carved from pink granite, a regal Sekhmet, and the goddess Isis herself. These discoveries were shipped triumphantly back to Turin-as easy as international shipping in the 1700s could be, which, let’s be honest, probably involved a lot of cursing at missing wagons.
Then, around the early 1800s, Europe caught Egypt-mania. Everyone wanted a piece of the pharaohs, and Bernardino Drovetti, a Piedmontese working as France’s consul in Egypt, didn’t miss a beat. He collected more than 7,000 rare treasures-statues, sarcophagi, mummies, papyrus scrolls, amulets, you name it. After Paris said “non, merci,” Drovetti pitched the collection to King Carlo Felice of Savoy for the princely sum of 400,000 lire. Torino hit the jackpot, and in 1824, the world’s very first Egyptian museum outside of Egypt was born.
The museum’s rooms, nestled in the stately Palazzo dell’Accademia delle Scienze-you’re actually standing right by it now-opened their creaky old doors. Even Jean-François Champollion, the man who cracked the hieroglyphic code, rushed here to try out his new skills on the real thing. I imagine him muttering under his breath, “So, *this* is what a pharaoh’s grocery list looks like!”
By 1888, after years of dusty catalogs and glass cases, the collection held 7,400 objects. Along the way, more treasures arrived-including rare items from Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. Then came Ernesto Schiaparelli, a man whose spirit for adventure rivaled Indiana Jones. In the early 1900s, he led fifteen massive expeditions to Egypt, sending even more artifacts back to Turin, including the breathtaking painted shroud of Gebelein and royal tombs that let us peek straight into the everyday lives (and afterlives) of ancient Egyptians.
Now, here’s a riddle for you: How many mummies can you fit in one museum without them complaining about the neighbors? In Turin’s Egyptian Museum, the answer is at least forty-twenty-four humans and seventeen animals, to be exact, scattered over five sprawling floors. There are also 700 complete papyri, 17,000 fragments, an entire temple rescued from a rising lake in Nubia, and treasures from the tomb of Nefertari.
Modern times brought big changes, too. In 2015, after three and a half years of renovations-thanks in part to the Italian lottery, proving that games of chance can support more than just your gelato habit-the museum reopened, doubled in size, glowing with state-of-the-art displays and high-tech conservation labs. Since then, more than a million visitors have wandered its halls each year, ogling the relics of one of humanity’s oldest civilizations.
Oh, and you know you’ve made it as a museum when you get your own botanical garden devoted to the plants of ancient Egypt! In 2022, Turin’s Egyptian Museum did just that-more proof, perhaps, that you never know what might spring up in a city so rich in stories.
So, step inside if you dare-just remember not to wake the mummies. They’ve been having a nap for a few millennia and get a little grumpy if you ask them for a selfie.
For a more comprehensive understanding of the collection, management or the headquarters and activities, engage with me in the chat section below.
