The Museo Egizio in Turin is the most important Egyptian collection in the world after Cairo, and you will find that sentence everywhere. What you almost never find is the reason, and there is nothing romantic about it: Turin was the capital of a state that wanted to count in nineteenth-century Europe, and buying Egypt was one way of counting.
The result is a museum that today holds more than forty thousand objects and that is, in all likelihood, the oldest Egyptian museum in the world: it was founded in 1824 and opened to the public in 1832, when Italy did not yet exist.
What follows is not a list of everything. These are the six things worth crossing five floors for, each with the story of how it ended up here, because in this museum the second half is as interesting as the first.
The museum begins with an object that is not Egyptian
What object does the oldest Egyptian collection in the world grow out of? It is worth knowing before you go in, because it is the strangest thing in this story. The first piece of the collection, the one everything else accumulated around, is the Mensa Isiaca: a bronze tablet a metre and a quarter long, inlaid with silver and coloured alloys, covered in gods and hieroglyphs.
Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy bought it in 1628 and it reached Turin around 1630. For a century and a half scholars pored over it convinced it held a secret doctrine.
It is not Egyptian. The museum’s own record dates it between 30 BC and AD 395 and places it in Rome: it is a Roman imperial object, made in Italy by craftsmen imitating Egypt because the cult of Isis was fashionable there. The hieroglyphs it carries do not say anything meaningful.
The irony is that Europe’s most important collection begins from a misunderstanding, and begins precisely because of it: it was to make sense of the Mensa that the Savoys sent someone to Egypt to look for evidence.
Donati, Drovetti and the year that matters: 1824
The first man sent was Vitaliano Donati, a botanist and professor at the University of Turin, who went to Egypt between 1759 and 1762 looking for the origin of the Mensa. He did not find it, but he came back with three statues taken from the temple of the goddess Mut at Karnak: an Isis, a Sekhmet and a Ramesses. It was the first time real Egypt entered Turin.
How do you get from three statues to forty thousand objects? The leap comes sixty years later. Bernardino Drovetti, a Piedmontese who was French consul general in Egypt during the years of Muhammad Ali, assembled an enormous collection by exploiting a position we would give other names today. In 1824 Carlo Felice bought it: more than four thousand objects, arriving in Turin in crates.
The seated statue of Ramesses II in granodiorite comes from that purchase. The label says exactly this: Karnak, temple of Amun, Drovetti collection, 1824. It is the piece everyone photographs, and it is tall enough that looking up at it tells you what it meant for an Egyptian of the New Kingdom to see his own king.
The Turin King List, and three hundred pieces reassembled by reading the fibres
Drovetti’s crates also held something that, when opened, had been reduced to crumbs: an administrative papyrus written on one side and, on the reverse, the list of the kings of Egypt from the gods down to the seventeenth dynasty, with the exact length of every reign in years, months and days.
This is the Turin King List, and it has no equivalent: no other Egyptian document gives the chronology in this form. The lists carved on temple walls celebrate the acceptable kings and erase the rest; this one lists them all, because it was never meant to be seen.
Champollion arrived in Turin in 1824, the very year the crates were being opened, and spent months on the newly arrived papyri. Of the King List he identified and described forty-eight fragments carrying a hundred and forty-two royal cartouches. Then, in 1826, the German Gustavus Seyffarth, who was his rival, put roughly three hundred of them back together in three months, and did it without reading the hieroglyphs: he matched the fragments by following the run of the plant fibres in the papyrus, the way you would match the grain of wood.
Just over three hundred survive today, in a frame more than two metres long. Looking at it is disappointing and instructive at the same time: that is the real state in which ancient history reaches us.
The Gallery of Kings, which since 2024 is not the one you may remember
Is the Gallery of Kings still the dark room in the photographs? If you have already visited the museum, or seen photographs of it, the Gallery of Kings you have in mind almost certainly no longer exists. It is worth knowing beforehand, because the change is radical and it divides people.
From 2006 to 2024 the room holding the monumental statues of Thebes was a black box designed by Dante Ferretti, the three-time Oscar-winning production designer: near-total darkness, a single beam of light on each statue, mirrors at either end multiplying the row. It was theatre, it photographed beautifully, and it was the room everybody remembered.
On 20 November 2024, for the bicentenary, that display was replaced by a new one from the Dutch practice OMA, which does the opposite: aluminium walls that let daylight in from the palazzo’s windows, no spotlights, pale backgrounds. The two sandstone sphinxes from Karnak no longer face the entrance but face each other, as they stood in the temple, and the panels show where each piece came from.
The reasoning is stated openly: the darkness made the statues look like mysterious objects, when they were the furniture of crowded, brightly lit temples. Those who loved the old room took it badly, and the argument is still going. Either way, expect light.
The tomb of Kha and Merit, the one thing here nobody had touched
If you are going to look properly at one thing in this museum, it is this.
On 15 February 1906 Ernesto Schiaparelli, the museum’s director and head of the Italian archaeological mission, reached the bottom of a shaft at Deir el-Medina with two hundred workmen. Deir el-Medina was the village of the craftsmen who dug and decorated the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. Inside was the burial of Kha, foreman of that village, and his wife Merit, who died around 1350 BC.
It was intact. No robber had found it in thirty-three centuries, and that is why it is worth more than everything else here: over four hundred and sixty objects still in place, not a selection of beautiful things but the complete contents of a burial.
And the contents are not what you expect. There are the coffins and Merit’s gilded funerary mask, of course. But there are also the bed, the stools, the chests with the linen still folded, Kha’s working tools, the board games, the little cosmetics jars, and the food: bread, dried fruit, meat. It is the household of two people, taken underground and found again.
Among the tools is a measuring instrument of Kha’s that scholars still argue about, and it is the most affecting thing in the room: a man whose trade was building tombs for kings had himself buried with his own instruments.
The temple of Ellesiya, which arrived in sixty-six pieces
On the lower floor there is a sandstone wall as tall as the room, carved rather than built, with its niches and reliefs still in place. It is a whole rock-cut temple, and it is not a reconstruction.
Thutmose III had it cut into the rock of Nubia. When the Aswan dam created Lake Nasser, dozens of Nubian monuments were about to go under water and UNESCO organised the rescue; Italy took part, and in 1970 Egypt thanked it with this temple. It was cut into sixty-six blocks, shipped and reassembled in Turin, where it was inaugurated on 4 September 1970.
It is the only place in Italy where you walk inside an Egyptian temple.
How to visit without coming out exhausted
The museum runs over five floors and the route is chronological from the top down, so you go up in the lift and walk down. It asks for two and a half hours if you keep moving, three if you read the labels, and it is not a museum you can do in an hour.
The practical advice that is worth more than any other: do not put it in the same afternoon as the Musei Reali. They are five minutes apart and the temptation is strong, but they are two collections of two and a half hours each.
If you are short of time and have to pick four things, pick the Gallery of Kings, the Kha and Merit room, the King List and the temple of Ellesiya, in that order along the route. They are on different floors and the map at the entrance marks them for you.
If you are building an itinerary, the museum is the first stop in What to see in Turin in 2 days, where I work out where it fits between the city’s closing days.
Practical information
Checked on 2 September 2026 on the museum’s official website. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 18 euros and the museum states that buying online is compulsory, with a timed slot: do not count on turning up at the desk. Entry is free with the Abbonamento Musei and the Torino+Piemonte Card, and costs 15 euros with the Royal Pass.
Opening hours. Monday 9 am to 2 pm, Tuesday to Friday and Sunday 9 am to 6.30 pm, Saturday 9 am to 8 pm. The short Monday catches out more visitors than anything else: half a day is not enough for this museum, so on a Monday either go early or move it to another day.
Where. The museum is at via Accademia delle Scienze 6, in the Collegio dei Nobili palace, five minutes on foot from piazza Castello and fifteen from Porta Nuova station.
How long it takes. Two and a half hours for the full route, an hour and a quarter if you aim only at the four main rooms.
On affiliate links, for the sake of honesty. There is no ticket reseller linked here. The museum sells only on its own site, with the timed slot: sending you to a reseller would simply make things worse.
Photo credits: museum facade by Gianni Careddu (CC BY-SA 4.0); statue of Sekhmet in the new Gallery of Kings by DFina (CC BY 4.0); Mensa Isiaca, statue of Ramesses II, Turin King List, mask of Merit and temple of Ellesiya, photographs released in CC0 by the Museo Egizio. All from Wikimedia Commons.
