EGYPTIAN TURIN

The Museo Egizio in Turin: some of its smallest exhibits are among my favourite things, see Egyptian Miniatures, but the museum itself is also wonderful. It is housed in a splendid baroque palace built as the Collegio dei Nobili, a Jesuit college, supported by Madama Reale and designed by the great genius of early Turinese baroque, Guarino Guarini, in 1679, in his idiosyncratic style of sculptural brick. Within, all is clean, bright and simple, with mummies and sarcophagi resting on glass shelves and a few surviving, 1824 display cases with animal legs. Part of the museum’s unparalleled collection of papyri lines the walls, behind glass. In summer the place is truly wonderful, with warm breezes blowing through open windows.

These pictures are all of rooms upstairs; on the ground floor, the huge halls were rearranged in 2006 with cinematic styling by Fellini protégé Dante Ferretti, who dramatically spotlit huge statues against dark walls, making an intensely exciting contrast. I love the broken, sculpted death-masks with black and white glass eyes, below, and the geometric wrapping of animal mummies like the cats in the bottom two pictures.

CAPITOLINE MUSEUMS

The Roman Capitol, il Campidoglio, one of the most perfect architectural spaces in the world, surrounded by one of its greatest museums: who can resist such wonders? The basic layout existed in 1539 when the city governors, the Conservatori, started work on Michelangelo’s design which so deftly adapted the old buildings and brilliantly recast their facades in his muscular classicism. His design was not completed with the palaces, finished in 1654, but with his famous star-patterned paving, below left, not laid until 1940. Above: one of the Dioscuri – Castor or Pollux? – with his horse at the top of the Cordonata staircase.

The museums began in 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV gave the city a collection of bronzes including the famous, 500BC suckling She-Wolf, to which he added the infants Romulus and Remus. The scale of many of the pieces is staggering, like the fragments of a great marble statue of Constantine, pictured above right while being expertly measured by my assistant. A roomful of Caesars, below, and endless further rooms crammed with marvels, and with the added beauty and drama of evening sunlight. The black marble Old Centaur was found at Hadrian’s Villa in 1736; below it, the colossal bronze head and hand, again of Constantine, were part of the original collection of 1471. Sadly, they’ve recently been removed from this wonderful, frescoed hall where they looked so magnificent, and placed in a drab, modern extension: some of their magic has gone.