Museo Egizio

In the Gallery of the Kings on the ground floor, the pharaohs now stand in daylight. The bicentenary works of 2024 opened up the vaults and tall windows of the old palace around statues brought from Thebes, among them a seated Ramesses II in black stone and a row of the lion goddess Sekhmet. Since 2006 the hall had been a black box lit by spotlights.

The building began in 1679 as a Jesuit college for young nobles. In 1824 Charles Felix, king of Sardinia, bought the collection of Bernardino Drovetti, a Piedmontese who had been French consul in Egypt, and founded here the oldest museum devoted entirely to ancient Egypt. That same year Champollion, the Frenchman who had just deciphered hieroglyphs, came to study its papyri and wrote that the road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin.

Later the museum went digging for itself. Between 1903 and 1937 Italian missions led by its director Ernesto Schiaparelli, then by Giulio Farina, sent some 30,000 finds to Turin, from Gebelein in the south to Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb builders at Thebes. There in 1906 they opened the intact tomb of the master builder Kha and his wife Merit, whose bed, linen and loaves of bread now fill a room of their own. In 1970 a whole rock-cut chapel followed, the temple of Ellesiya, Egypt's thanks for Italian help in saving the monuments of Nubia.

Since reopening in 2015 the museum has spread over five floors and holds about 40,000 objects. On the second floor, the Galleries of Material Culture show some 12,000 of them in rows of glass cases. Its curators still excavate too, at Saqqara near Memphis, in a joint mission with the national museum of antiquities in Leiden.