EGYPTIAN MUSEUM, History

Hi, I'm Alyson, your personal guide. Together with MyWoWo, I'd like to welcome you to one of the wonders of the world.

Today I'll accompany you through the Egyptian Museum.

This museum has one of the most important collections of Egyptian art in the world, it's second only to the one in Cairo!

You should know that this collection was started almost three centuries ago thanks to a scientist and an archaeologist: the scientist was a scholar from Padua named Vitaliano Donati who taught botany and natural history at the University of Turin in the mid-1700s. When the King sent him on an expedition to Egypt with both scientific and commercial purposes, he brought a collection of objects back to Piedmont that had been put together to serve as "encyclopedic documentation". The collection was at the forefront of those times, and included objects, mummies, and manuscripts. And this is how the first nucleus of objects of the Royal University Museum came to be, which would then become the Egyptian Museum....