Turin in the mist

After my visit to the Egyptian Museum I met up with Thibault, freshly in from Montpellier, and we set off for a walk down to the river in a damp misty (some might say foggy) Turin. I feel the photos would have looked rather better with  a clear blue sky...

Crossing the Po a bit of a climb takes one up to the church of Santa Maria del Monte

Gran Madre di Rio is a rather fine neo-classical church just across the river Po which we took in on the way back down from Santa Maria

 

Egyptian Museum in Turin

Apparently the best collection of Egyptian artefacts outside Egypt. Anyways, the best presented collection of Egyptian artefacts I have seen by a good margin. Anywhere.

The collection is certainly extensive, but not content with just showing the collection (with plenty of English translations on labelling) they have lots of videos and screens explaining backgrounds to various things. I spent a good while watching a "video" of a mummy being "unwrapped", ie it showed a mummy that had been x-rayed and took one through the jewellery, the techniques, the bones and what could be surmised from all of that.

But before entering the museum, proper I had booked a free ticket to see a monument that would have been submerged by the Aswan dam, but instead had been chipped out of the hillside by Italian archaeologists and brought here. It would be a rather bland exhibit without a light show on the exterior of the monument explaining its history.

This is the interior

After a few minutes in there I went round the corner into the museum proper. It was very popular - fully booked over the weekend and about 11am on the Monday was the first slot available.

The exhibition doesn't just include all the flashy stuff one would expect, but really interesting things like Egyptian tools 

this may look a grotty stained tunic, but it once dressed an Egyptian and was found in a tomb from over 4000 years ago