Museo Egizio

The oldest museum anywhere devoted entirely to ancient Egypt, and by most counts still the second-largest Egyptological collection in the world after Cairo's, built from a single decisive 1824 purchase of Bernardino Drovetti's collection rather than accumulated slowly. Its papyri, the Turin King List foremost among them, gave Champollion the material to test hieroglyphic decipherment in the same year the museum was founded. Its single strongest holding is depth rather than scattered highlights: the intact tomb assemblage of Kha and Merit, three separate versions of the Book of the Dead, a temple moved whole from Nubia, and a statue corridor redesigned twice in twenty years to stage colossal royal sculpture as theatre. The institution around the objects has been almost as often rebuilt as the objects themselves, changing legal structure in 2004, its principal rooms in 2006, its entire layout in 2015, and, as of this page's research date, parts of its galleries again, while its director has spent a decade defending the museum's own choices about who it addresses and how, in Italy's national political arena rather than only in its exhibition halls.

An Egyptian-style altar table, the Mensa Isiaca, reached Turin in 1630 for a temple to Isis in Rome and later passed into Savoy hands; its presence in the city is what prompted King Charles Emmanuel III to send the botanist Vitaliano Donati to Egypt in 1753, where he collected roughly 300 objects from Karnak and Coptos that became the collection's actual starting point. The museum as it exists, though, dates to 1824, when King Charles Felix bought the holdings of Bernardino Drovetti, Napoleon's former consul general in Egypt, whose own collecting had amassed 5,268 pieces, including around 100 statues and 170 papyri, stelae and mummies. That single purchase, not the 1753 expedition, is what the museum counts as its founding date, and it made Turin's the first museum anywhere devoted entirely to ancient Egyptian civilisation rather than to Egypt as one gallery among many. In the same year, Jean-Francois Champollion travelled to Turin specifically to test his newly cracked hieroglyphic system against the collection's papyri, and it was that visit that produced his verdict, still quoted on the museum's own walls: the road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin.

Among the papyri Champollion examined was what is now called the Turin King List, a Ramesside-era papyrus recording pharaohs from legendary rulers down through roughly the 19th Dynasty, and still the single most important chronological source for early Egyptian history despite arriving in Turin already badly damaged in transit. Champollion's own study of the collection is bound up with a story the museum's own institutional history repeats rather than dismisses: that part of the King List went missing after his visit and was only later recovered, with some fragments still unaccounted for, and that a parapsychologist was consulted in 1950 in an unsuccessful attempt to locate them. Whatever the truth of the disappearance, the practical fact is plainer and better documented: the list survives with real gaps, and reconstructions of the early Egyptian king-lists still have to work around them.

The Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli directed the museum from 1894 to 1928 and ran excavation campaigns in Egypt between 1900 and 1920 that substantially reshaped the collection. His most significant single find came in 1906: the tomb of the architect Kha and his wife Merit at Deir el-Medina (TT8), discovered completely undisturbed and moved to Turin as an intact funerary assemblage rather than dispersed piece by piece, an outcome rare enough that it remains one of the most complete non-royal Egyptian burials known anywhere. February 2026 marked the tomb's 120th anniversary, and the museum marked it by bringing two objects from the same burial back to Turin for the first time in living memory: the pyramidion carrying Kha's name, on loan from the Musee du Louvre, and Merit's own Book of the Dead, on loan from the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Both are shown in Room 7, inside the museum's own Kha-and-Merit itinerary, from 14 February to 17 August 2026, a loan that closes within days of this page being researched.

The Museo Egizio has changed its own institutional shape more than most peer museums. At the end of 2004 it became a case study in an Italian government experiment: rather than remain a directly state-run museum, it was placed under a new Fondazione Museo delle Antichita Egizie, a private foundation structure. Ahead of Turin's hosting of the 2006 Winter Olympics the building itself was substantially remodelled, with its principal rooms, above all the statue corridor that became the Gallery of the Kings, redesigned by the film production designer Dante Ferretti using theatrical lighting and mirrored surfaces. Less than a decade later, on 1 April 2015, the museum reopened again under an entirely new exhibition layout, logo and visual identity designed by the studio Migliore+Servetto, under Christian Greco, who had become director the previous year. That pattern, of the same institution being substantially rebuilt and relaunched roughly every decade, continues now: as of August 2026 the museum's own visitor notice describes ongoing renovation work across new galleries, alongside the separate, still-unexplained closure of the Historic Rooms on floor -1 since 12 December 2025.

Christian Greco has run the Museo Egizio since 2014, a tenure widely credited, including by his political critics, with strong cultural and financial results. He has also spent much of that decade as a target of the Italian political right. The pattern began in 2017-2018, when Greco introduced a discounted admission scheme for Arabic-speaking visitors called Fortunato chi parla arabo (Lucky are those who speak Arabic). During the tense run-up to Italy's 2018 general election, members of Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia accused Greco of reverse racism against Italians and staged a protest outside the museum behind a banner reading no islamizzazione. Greco walked outside and debated Meloni in person; the exchange was filmed, circulated widely, and Greco was broadly credited with responding calmly, pointing out that speaking Arabic and being Muslim are not the same thing. Meloni, in turn, accused the scheme of discriminating against Christians and of misusing public money, a claim Greco rebutted by noting the museum's budget is not state-funded and was in fact running a surplus. Fratelli d'Italia issued a statement threatening to replace museum directors, Greco among them, if it took power, although museum-director appointments do not in fact fall under Italy's political spoils system and the Museo Egizio is not a state museum. A second flashpoint came in 2021, when Piedmont's regional government tried to install the Egyptologist Francesco Tiradritti on the museum's board over Greco's objection; Greco threatened to resign rather than accept the appointment, and Tiradritti was kept off the board. The dispute reignited most sharply in September 2023, after Piedmont's regional welfare councillor Maurizio Marrone told Corriere della Sera he would not reconfirm Greco if it were his decision, citing unnamed 'more qualified figures.' Lega's deputy secretary Andrea Crippa went further, calling Greco ideological and racist against Italians and saying he would do everything to have him removed, calling on the culture minister to fire him if he did not resign of his own accord; Crippa had previously circulated a video making false claims about the 2018 scheme, for which he was initially found liable for damages before that judgment was overturned on appeal. This time the backing for Greco came from an unusually broad range of quarters: Italy's Egyptological community closed ranks behind him, and so, notably, did several members of Piedmont's own centre-right regional government, including its culture councillor, who stated that recent criticism did not dent the region's trust in a professional who had demonstrably worked well for the museum. Neither Meloni nor the national culture minister took a public position in 2023. Greco's own response, reported under the headline asking Meloni to come see the museum for herself rather than argue about it from a distance, was that he had no need to cling to his chair.

Visitors and critics alike rank this among the best-run and most modern-feeling Egyptology museums in the world, crediting director Christian Greco's decade-plus tenure with transforming a dated, dimly curated collection into an internationally admired institution, at the same time as the museum has become an unusually visible target for domestic Italian political attacks over how inclusively it presents itself.