Chapter Thirteen—The Turin Egyptian Museum: A Mark of Pride

I know: there are lots of museums in Turin. But the Torinese are terribly proud of all they’ve built in terms of culture, and they’ve built a lot.

The Egyptian museum is one of the things they are most proud of. As they’ll tell you (often), the Egyptian museum in Turin is supposedly the second best in the world, however you qualify how one Egyptian museum is better than another; I suppose there are people even for that.

I was hesitant to go. The Egypt thing isn’t normally my thing. Normally I go to a place with Egyptian artifacts and plaques about which pharaoh reigned when and what he did and then about how some pharaoh was actually a girl, and there’s always a lot about cats, and everything is about death and everything is so old and there are so many different eras and areas and kingdoms during the Egyptian dominance of north Africa and the Middle East. Normally I think it’s just a bunch of old rocks.

And while I didn’t enjoy the Egyptian museum as much as the car museum, the Egyptians have things to offer that the employees of FIAT do not.

As we’ve learned with the Italians, the museum was beautiful. It is located in an old building near the city center, a short walk from Porta Nuova and Piazza San Carlo, and you’ll get a discount if you bring your student ID.

A good thing about this museum is that most of the signs have English translations to go along with the Italian. This museum, like the auto museum, tells a narrative of the empire. There are several different sections of the museum, and there is an order to the sections. It isn’t a free-for-all. (Actually, I got confused and went in the last section first, and ended up doing the museum backwards. But there is a way that you’re supposed to go.)

There are statues, mummies, hieroglyphs, sculptures, painted coffins, large sarcophaguses, small ones, and there are huge ones. There is a lot to do, a lot to see, a lot to photograph. I didn’t spent too much time there, but it was worth the handful of Euros it cost to buy the tickets.



Anyway, now anytime someone from Turin asked if I had been to their world-famous Egyptian museum, I could please them by saying yes and then lauding it as the greatest and most beautiful museum ever to exist.