The Egyptian Museum
Museo Egizio – Vase Gallery
Image © Andrea Jemolo
Torino, Italy
2024
Turin’s Museo Egizio (Egyptian Museum) has the accolade of being the world’s oldest museum dedicated to ancient Egyptian material culture. Founded in 1824, with foundation objects that were acquired even earlier in the 17th and 18th centuries, its world-class collections grew rapidly with pioneering archaeological digs and discoveries in the early 1900s.
Units
34
Along with Egyptian antiquities, the museum has gathered Roman, pre-Roman and prehistoric relics, along with a natural history collection. Today, the entire collection comprises more than 36,000 artifacts. The Museum has also formed part of a long-standing cultural enclave, sharing a building with the Academy of Sciences.
In 2024 the Museo Egizio celebrated its bicentennial anniversary with the opening of a new permanent exhibition. “Materia. Forma del tempo” explores materials in ancient Egypt, from woods, pigments, ceramic vessels, and stone objects, spanning from the Predynastic Period (ca. 4000–3100 BCE) to the Byzantine Era (565–642 CE). Goppion was contracted to provide 34 new wall-standing display cases for a new gallery within this exhibition.
The purpose of these new customized display cases was to house an extensive collection of more than 5,000 fired-clay ancient Egyptian vessels. The fragile pottery required careful installation and rigorous ongoing protection. Goppion’s display solutions were, as usual, designed to ensure the best possible conservation conditions by controlling internal factors such as brightness, temperature, and humidity, thereby stabilizing the delicate materials against environmental threats. Each display case is equipped with a gel drawer and LED lighting.
The gallery has a very high ceiling. To take advantage of this feature – and given the large quantity of objects to be displayed – the Museum decided to divide the room into two levels. The lower level is accessible to visitors, while the upper level is reserved for storage and accessible only to curatorial staff.
Although the design brief required a distinctly industrial structure, we aimed to find the right balance between the antiquity of the objects and sleek modernity of the design. The imposing final two-level structure contains the display cases, a glass walkway structure and a hidden staircase.
From October 2024, visitors are able to enjoy the spectacle of this new display as part of their journey through 4,000 years of history, art and archaeology at Museo Egizio.
Image © Andrea Jemolo