The Italian Cultural Institute hosted a conference with the Director of the Archaeological Museum of Turin, Professor Christian Greco, entitled “Museo Egizio. 1824-2015: Nuove connessioni e contestualizzazione archeologica”.
One of Europe’s main Egyptology centres
“At the start of the 19th century, the Egyptian Museum of Turin was one of the principal centres for Egyptology in Europe, promoting projects and attracting scholars, and it needs to regain that function today. It is in our museum’s interests to highlight the connection between its artefacts through the story of their discovery, archaeological recontextualisation and reunification of objects, and the prosopographic studies by many personalities from written sources. It is indispensable therefore to identify historic ties and develop a network of collaboration with other cultural and scientific institutions and Italian and foreign collections. Our main priority is to recreate the archaeological and historic context of these objects. The key word “connection” expresses the continuity between the museum’s past and present.
Il significato e gli obiettivi culturali di una collezione e la sua organizzazione cambiano nel tempo
“A museum that reviews itself does no more than pay homage to its nature and its function. The objects that it contains assume a definite quality and a definite value compared with those that are either still associated with a use or whose use has been lost or forgotten, and are displayed to visitors according to programmes, at times implicit, that the museum suggests or allows. It is therefore in the order of things that gaining and varying cultural experience by going back over time compels us to review the scale of values and meaning of what constitutes an apparently unique patrimony. The meaning of a facility of this sort is capable of continual renewal even though it remains materially the same: its growth depends not only on quantitative reasoning but also on the value they accrue”.
As the thoughts of Sergio Donadoni bring clearly to the fore, the meaning and cultural ends of a collection and its organisation change over time. A museum must necessarily pose the question of how its collection can meet the scientific expectations of research and the changing intellectual needs of visitors.
