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Turin’s Egyptian Museum. Millennial present.

by Christian Greco

2014 was the year of challenges. Most important was my leaving the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, Holland, where I was the Curator of the Egyptian section in order to take on the direction of the Egyptian Museum in Turin. This latter museum has the second most important collection in the world after Cairo of Egyptian art. My second challenge, maybe even more important, was to be able to inaugurate the museum on the date intended for its opening on April 1st 2015 – an appointment we were able to meet.
From the very beginning, I have chosen as a guideline for the new Egyptian Museum the absolute centrality of scientific research. Only by means of profound scientific activity may the collection that we have the honour and duty to preserve live, receive new ideas to be better understood and obtain the best possible care and attention concerning its upkeep. This is why the first great task, both mine as well as of the scientific staff as a whole (I have been exceptionally keen to increase from two to eight the number of curators and include in the team young people from a variety of backgrounds), has been to draw up a new scientific project that will be able to support the new exhibition layout. We have chosen to give the new Museum a clearly archaeological feel, going beyond the original ideas for a romantic 19th Century museum. Great attention has been paid to the relationships between the objects in the collection both through the history of their discovery as well as the recomposition of their original archaeological contexts. The objects in the collection are to be read in two ways. They represent specific epochs and places throughout ancient Egyptian history but at the same time are the results of exploration, excavation and acquisition. This double nature of these Turinese collections, in part antiquarian and in part archaeological, is told by the rooms dedicated to the history of the Museum. This is a novelty that responds very precisely to the general public’s most frequently asked question: “Why do we have an Egyptian Museum in Turin?”
The exhibition reconstructs contexts related to cult and residential dwellings and funereal objects as well as the history of the missions and their organisation and the way they worked. This explains why old documents have found their way into the new exhibition layout. The exhibition today is developed chronologically and is articulated on four floors covering a time span that goes from 4000 BC to 700 AD. Among the many innovations there is a thematic area full of impact – the Gallery of the Sarcophagi – which on the second floor has some of the most beautiful sarcophagi of the Third Intermediate Period and later eras (1000-600 BC), many of which having been restored at the Restoration Centre at Venaria Reale. The exhibition has also benefitted from the results achieved by the Vatican Coffin Project, a sophisticated study carried out for the first time on sarcophagi from ancient Egyptian. The Egyptian Museum, the Rijksmuseum van Oudhen, the Louvre and the Centre de Recherché et de Restauration des Muse’es de France have taken part in the project that has been coordinated by the Egyptian Antiquity Department of the Vatican Museums in collaboration with the Laboratorio Diagnostico for Preservation and Restoration at the Vatican Museums.
The participation of the Vatican Coffin Project represents an important point in my career at the Egyptian Museum since it is emblematic of a modus operandi that I have chosen to adopt, i.e. forming a network with the most important national and international research centres. This is why numerous “memoranda of understanding” have been signed with Italian and foreign universities and why partnerships – such as the one with the CNR (the National Research Council) – have been set up. Within a much vaster area of collaboration the latter body has created virtual reconstructions of archaeological contexts. Visitors may therefore live the experience of discovery thanks to 3D videos based upon precious excavation documents and old photographs, giving life back to the tombs of Kha, Nefertari and to the chapel of Maia, all discovered by Ernesto Schiaparelli, one of the first Directors of the Museum at the beginning of the 20th Century.
A museum and centre for archaeological research – a role desired by the Egyptian Museum – has to be, above all else, active in its very field. This may explain why I have strongly sought to enable the Museum to once more start excavations in Egypt after an absence of twenty years. This has taken place in the shape of an Italo-Dutch mission that is working on the necropolis of Saqqara. The initial results of this research have been more than satisfying. My work and the work of my staff have not stopped at the 10,000 square metre space of the Museum. We have continued unceasingly to organise temporary exhibitions that are intended for our ever-growing public ( 500,000 visitors in little more than five months, from the inauguration until today).
The new Egyptian Museum is therefore a museum that enjoys a constant dialogue with the outside world. It dialogues successfully with the international scientific community, proving itself as a reference point for research, and with fellow organisations in the public sector. The Museum pays great attention to its visitors, providing six-language guides – a number that is bound to increase – with display descriptions that are translated not only into English but also into Arabic in order to emphasize the close ties to the lands from where the Egyptian collections originated. This will demonstrate the Museum’s eagerness to open out towards the Arabic-speaking community in Italy and beyond so that they will feel enabled to identify themselves with this extraordinary collection that hails from their homelands and that we have undertaken to preserve.