Museo Egizio

Champollion's quip — that the road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin — remains the best introduction to this museum. Founded in 1824, the Museo Egizio is the world's oldest museum devoted entirely to Egyptian antiquity, its collection rivalled only by Cairo: royal statues, buried papyri, intact tombs and a written record of Egyptian civilisation unmatched in the West.

Why it matters

The museum's collection exceeds 40,000 artefacts and is generally ranked the second most important of Egyptian antiquities anywhere, after Cairo. What distinguishes it is breadth across every category: sculpture, papyri, funerary material and everyday objects, from the Paleolithic to the Coptic era. It is also among Italy's most visited museums, with more than a million visitors recorded in 2024, and it operates as a research institution whose papyrological and restoration laboratories are known well beyond Piedmont, drawing scholars to Turin from every continent.

What to notice

Begin in the Gallery of the Kings, where monumental statuary — including the five-tonne statue of Sethy II — stands in open, dramatically lit space rather than behind glass. The Tomb of Kha and Merit, discovered intact by Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1906, is displayed as a whole funerary assemblage, the architect's furniture and instruments still grouped as deposited. Seek out the Turin King List, the papyrus canon of pharaohs that remains a backbone of Egyptian chronology, and the Papyrus of Iuefankh, at over 18 metres the longest papyrus in the museum. The live Restoration Area shows mummies and artefacts being treated in public view, a transparency unusual among the great museums and one reason Egyptologists treat Turin as a working institute rather than a storehouse.

Context and history

Turin's Egyptian holdings began modestly in the 18th century, but the decisive moment came in 1824, when King Carlo Felice acquired the collection assembled in Egypt by the French consul Bernardino Drovetti — over five thousand objects including a hundred statues and 170 papyri. In that same year Jean-François Champollion, fresh from deciphering hieroglyphs, used the Turin papyri to test his discoveries, giving the museum a founding role in Egyptology itself; indeed, it remains the oldest museum in the world devoted entirely to Egyptian antiquity. Ernesto Schiaparelli's excavations around 1900 added the great tomb groups, including Kha and Merit. After a major redesign the museum reopened in 2015 in the Palazzo dell'Accademia delle Scienze, its historic home on Via Accademia delle Scienze opposite the Risorgimento museum, and it has since remained one of Italy's most visited museums.