Turin. Torino. I went with a goal in mind — I wanted to see the temple there, at the Museo Egizio. Lately my friend and I had been doing hotel crawls, but this wasn’t a hotel crawl. We stayed at one hotel, not a perfect one, but a perfectly adequate one. Good room, Egyptian-style spa. Confused Americans at check-in. A pretty good oat milk cappuccino on the first day, not so good the second (in Sardinia they didn’t even understand what I meant by oat milk, so we’re doing well here). I was here to see one of the transported temples outside Egypt, and the hotel certainly fit the theme.
The Hotel Victoria & Iside Spa is just 5 minutes from the museum I was aiming for. We went on a Sunday. It was crowded. But I wasn’t trying to be perfect here. Getting there is good enough. And the beauty of it was that it was actually so easy. A 1.5 hour flight from Amsterdam. Tiny airport. And sunshine! Yes, I could use the sunshine for a weekend. I brought my two-year-old, and met my friend at the hotel.
We had a fantastic pizza outside in the sun on that first day. I was slightly panicky at the acorns / seeds that were falling from the trees above our head at intervals. I asked the waitress if they ever hit people. She said yes. Not very comforting. But the pizza was good.
After that, we strolled around. Here is where I came up with my theory that the best thing to do when you’re in a new city is to head towards the water — whether it’s a lake, ocean, river. It doesn’t matter how big or small the town I’m in is: the water helps me to feel the expansiveness of this new place I’m visiting, to revel in that newness and sense of potential. Walking along the river in Turin gave me an impression of majesty. It’s really a beautiful, grand city, and the hills with the villas in the background add to that feeling. If I’d had more time there, I would have wanted to explore those hills too.
But I was here for the Egyptian Museum in Turin. I’ve been considering this concept of travel themes or quests. Others have considered this idea, such as Rolf Potts (he discusses quests in his thoughtful podcast on travel). For example, a quest to try as many nice spa hotels as I can. Or a quest to eat all the tacos in a town, when I’m not traveling. One of those ‘quests’ I’ve been quietly working my way through is the Egyptian Temple Quest. Yes, I know it sounds silly, but I’ll tell you what I mean.
I unknowingly visited my first Egyptian temple when I was a teenager at the Met in New York. The temple there seemed cool but I don’t think I even realised what it meant that there was an actual construct, straight from Egypt, here on American soil. I didn’t consider how it had got there, if it should be there, or any of that. I was just fascinated and happy to experience it.
Then a gap elapsed until I was able to more thoroughly expand my interest in Egyptology. I studied hieroglyphs for a few terms (including setting up the first hieroglyphs class with my professors at Waseda University in Tokyo in 2009!). I read literature. I went to Egypt in 2019. And I found out about these temples — which were not stolen, as you might be forgiven for assuming, given other aspects of archaeological history. They were actually gifted to these countries by Egypt after the construction of the Aswan Dam:
Temple of Debod: Madrid, Spain
Temple of Dendur: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, United States
Temple of Taffeh: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, the Netherlands
Temple of Ellesyia: Museo Egizio, Turin, Italy
Kalabsha Gate: Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Berlin, Germany
So it became my goal to visit these temples, the ones that have been relocated over the years. I found out (probably in 2019) that the temple I had stumbled into in New York, and then subsequently the one in Madrid, had been relocated when the Aswan Dam was being built in the 1960s. In order to save them from being flooded, they were actively taken from their locations and placed in a whole new one — this time not as some sort of suspicious looted item or piece with provenance-unknown, but as gifts to the governments that had helped move that most gigantic and symbolic of all temples, Abu Simbel.
So with my trip to Turin in September 2023, I wasn’t doing what my friend and I call a hotel crawl (which we’ve been doing faithfully since 2017, and believe me, I’ll get to those). Instead, I was adding to my temple quest, after seeing the Leiden temple at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in 2022, with the one in Turin at the Egyptian Museum there.
On a busy weekend morning, I sped up to the top of the museum, escalator after escalator, holding on to my son and getting in my day’s exercise early on. It was distressingly busy. 10am on a Sunday? Sure, it made sense that it was full of people. I hadn’t been picky about when we traveled to Turin. I just wanted to get there. And I only had one goal for the trip. Well, two. One was to see this temple. The other was to eat pizza at every meal (this tends to be my goal for my Italy trips). I managed to achieve both.
The beginning of the museum route was hideously busy. It was actually a little distressing with a two-year-old. We got there early enough, however, that I was able to speed down to the basement where the Temple of Ellesiya is, and there was no one there. The Gallery of Kings, as they call it, is beautiful.
A whole gallery of majestic Egyptian statues leads into a little antechamber housing an ancient, ancient temple from the 18th Dynasty. Pharaoh Thutmoses III built it, the pharaoh who reigned after (and probably killed off) his aunt, one of the only female pharaohs in history, Pharaoh Hatshepsut. (A dramatisation of their conflict is featured in one of my favourite novels, Child of the Morning by Pauline Gedge.)
So, I’ve got one more temple left outside Egypt — the one in Berlin. As of today, I’ve also decided to book that trip at the very last minute!
However controversial ancient art in museums abroad is, given their original provenance, I cannot help but think that it is certainly positive that so many people can visit and experience them outside their homelands in their own local museums. How many of us are lucky enough to actually go to Egypt?
When I did go to Egypt, I realised something I hadn’t quite understood beforehand: the sheer amount of old stuff at every turn in Egypt is vast. It’s impossible to highlight each meaningful item (even places outside Egypt, like the Petrie Museum in London, demonstrate this — it feels more like a garage stuffed full with old stuff than a museum). There’s too much of it. Surely being able to experience these temples outside Egypt is opening up that opportunity for many more people than would normally be able to view them. After all, if you were to see these small temples in Egypt they would feel minuscule compared to the others you can visit, like Karnak or Abu Simbel. But on their own, in Berlin or Leiden or Madrid or Turin, suddenly you see: they are each so meaningful on their own.
Of course, nothing beats seeing them in situ. I’ve been to the cliched key spots in Egypt, but I want to go back to hit the temples that were relocated, not just Abu Simbel. You can do that on a cruise down through Lake Nasser. One day. We’ll get there, one temple at a time.
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