Turin Royal Museum

At the Royal Museums of Turin, the new Archaeological Gallery has been inaugurated: a permanent exhibition for the oldest works.

The central corridor is designed to evoke a palace gallery, where along the walls are lined up Greek and Roman statues, sculpted reliefs, and marble busts, presenting to the visitor the salient features of ancient representation: portrait heads, true images of antiquity’s propaganda; Roman reproductions of famous works; banquet scenes on sarcophagi, culminating in the suggestive Rotunda of the Emperors, where the busts of the main characters of Roman history surround the visitor.

The Assyrian artifacts, which arrived at the Museum in 1847, are dedicated to the Ancient Near East area, which is joined by the richest collection in Italy of cuneiform texts and cylinder seals.

Within the fifth section on antiquities from the island of Cyprus, the museum’s largest collection is housed: it comprises over 1,000 pieces capable of documenting the evolution of this extraordinary cultural crossroads over a chronological period ranging from the ancient Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) to late antiquity (4th-5th century AD).”