Turin Attractions

Venue: Egyptian Museum    When: Daily; not Mon

On the cosy Piazza Carignano, in-between the baroque theatre and the former Academy of Sciences, Turin's Egyptian Museum houses the most important collection of Egyptian antiquities after that of Cairo.

The Museo Egizio was founded in 1824 and hasn't changed much ever since. The atmosphere is still that of a 19th-century exhibition. Three-metre white wood caskets host sarcophagi and mummies and on the shelves running all around the walls more than 30,000 pieces document the history of Egypt from 2500BC to 500BC.

Jean-François Champollion, the French archaeologist who decoded Egyptian gereoglyphics, wrote the first catalogue of the museum and reckoned that the statue of Rameses II, flagship of the collection, was one of the masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture. Other interesting pieces at the museum, once dubbed "a marvellous assembly of goddesses and kings," include the Judicial Papyrus, a report of the trial of the conspirators who assassinated Rameses II, and the Papyrus of Mines, a map of the gold mines of Uadi Hammamat.