A truly important museum with a long history behind it: discovering the new Egyptian, renovated in 2015.
One of the major tourist attractions of the city of Turin is without a doubt the Egyptian museum, the most important museum in the world, after the one in Cairo, for its value and the finds it contains.
In 2014 its management was entrusted to the "Egyptian Museum Foundation of Turin".
In 2018 it was theeighth most visited Italian museum and the previous year it was recognized as the first among the most popular museums in Italy and the ninth in Europe.
The history of the Egyptian Museum
The history of this museum dates back to 1759 when an Egyptologist named Vitalino Donati he went to Egypt to carry out some excavations and found numerous artifacts, which he brought to Turin.
At the beginning of the 800th century a little one was born fashion linked to the collection of Egyptian antiquities, so much so that in 1824 King Carlo Felice bought the large collection of artifacts of Bernardino Drovetti, the consul of France during the occupation in Egypt, to which he combined as many antiquities of the House of Savoy and gave life to what was the very first Egyptian Museum in the world.
Between 1903 and 1937 Ernesto Schiapparelli (from which comes the name of the current wing of the museum called Ala Schiapparelli) brought to Turin and the museum about 30.000 artifacts from Egypt, and in 1924 there was a new arrangement of the spaces with a official visit by the King.
Other adaptations were made in the 80s, when the Rock temple of Ellesyva, donated by the Egyptian government as a thank you for Italian help in saving temples threatened by the Aswan dam.
The building both then and today is shared with the Academy of Sciences.
The collection of the new Museum
The whole collection of the Museum is dedicated to the Egyptians, inside you can find mummies, sarcophagi, papyri and everything related to the history of ancient Egypt.
After some renovations and renovations of the premises, on 1 April 2015 the Museum reopened its doors to the public and has doubled its exhibition space.
It is divided into four floors (specifically three on land and one underground), e the tour follows a chronological order, which illustrates step by step all the stages in the history of Egypt.
The finds contained within it range from the Palaeolithic to the Coptic era.
The most important pieces of the collection
The tomb of Kha and Merit
The rock temple of Ellesija
The Royal Canon, better known by the name of Papyrus of Turin
The Isiac canteen, a find that the Savoy family obtained from the Gonzagas in the XNUMXth century
The funeral cloth
The reliefs of Djoser
The statues of the goddesses Isis and Sekhmet and that of Ramses II
The Papyrus of the gold mines
The sarcophagus, the trousseau and the scale plan of the tomb of Queen Nefertari
The Tomb of Maia
What can I say, you cannot fail to visit such an important museum and so rich in history, so if you pass by Turin, drop by because you will not regret it!
