The Egyptian Museum of Turin is entirely devoted to Egyptian art and culture. It is also one of the most visited museums in Italy. It has the world’s second most important collection of Egyptian antiquities, and is the most significant and largest museum of its kind outside of Egypt.
Ever since the Museum was founded in 1824, it has attracted not only tourists and enthusiasts of Egyptology, but also prominent scholars. Over half a million visitors – in 2013, more than 540,000 people visited the Museum, a 24.8% increase compared to the previous year – have made the Egyptian Museum the ninth most visited museum in Italy, and one of the 100 most visited museums worldwide.
The Egyptian Museum of Turin is currently under going major renovation, to be completed by 1 April 2015. Despite the on going work, the museum is being kept open for the public. Until April 2015, a new museum it inerary entitled Immortals. The Art and Knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians, inaugurated in August 2013, will offer the public a more up-to-date
approach to the museum and a more direct relationship with the artifacts, thanks to the possibility of observing them from every angle.
The museum is aiming to achieve full compliance with the most up-to-date international standards. Once the renovation is completed, the Egyptian Museum’s display surface area will have almost doubled, increasing from the present 6,500m2 to 10,000m2. Presently, the Museum has approximately 2,500 artifacts on exhibit (“Hypogeum”, Tomb of Kha and the Statuary). The rest of the collection, which comprises roughly 32,000 artifacts, is not open to the public at the moment, partly because of conservation concerns, and partly because many artifacts, while extremely interesting for scholars, lack a strong museo graphical appeal.
The new management of the museum has a keen interest in investigating connections between objects by exploring the history of their discovery or reconstructing burial assemblages, looking beyond Turin to flesh out the picture with links to objects in other museums and Egypt itself.
The main aim of the new museum is thus to place even more emphasis on the archeological and historical context of the objects. Photographs and multimedia will be used to emphasize the landscape that was the original setting of the objects, and thereby bring Egypt back into the galleries.
The building housing the Egyptian Museum of Turin is, and has always been, the Palazzo dell’Accademia delle Scienze. Designed in 1678, is generally attributed to Guarino Guarini, but its construction was probably directed by Michelangelo Garove.
The “Fondazione Museo delle Antichità Egizie di Torino” was officially constituted on October 6, 2004, and is the Italian state’s first venture into museum management also involving the private sector. The Foundation was constituted by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities - which transferred to the Foundation the management of the museum’s collection for 30 years - along with the Piedmont Region, the Province of Turin, the City of Turin, the Compagnia di San Paolo, and the CRT Foundation.
Since November 19, 2012, the President of the Foundation is Evelina Christillin.
Since April 28, 2014, the Director of the Egyptian Museum of Turin is Christian Greco.
