ktravula – a travelogue!

At Museo Egizio: Photos

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I’d leave this post to speak for itself through the pictures taken at the Turin Egyptian Museum. But I’m leaving the pictures here for another reason: to save my hard drive  from having to store up all of these for all eternity. Photos, like the many of the dead relics in the museum, must – if they will live forever – find a well-visited and well-curated place worthy of their presence.


I must, also, strongly suggest that anyone who cares for ancient history, art, and Egypt should check out the museum. It is worth spending the whole day enjoying, and learning from.


 




At Museo Egizio: Photos was published on August 8th, 2016, with the tags , , , , , , under the Observations, Travelling category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Through Crocetta

Getting to the Egyptian Museum from central Turin was supposed to be straightforward, but the mapping of someone else’s city always looks easy on paper. What we planned, the five of us cramped excitedly into a small car in pursuit of the mysteries of the Torino archaeological museum, was to get ourselves into the city center, disembark, and then take one of the numerous city trams towards the museum itself. Simple enough. In reality, when we landed at Crocetta – which isn’t the city centre as much, but just slightly south of it, a few of us needed cash from the ATM machine, some needed a smoke, all of us were hungry, and time was ticking. Two members of the group had a plane to catch in a few hours.

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The first impression of Crocetta isn’t notable, perhaps because the town wears a garb of normalcy that seemed out of place for some reason. But reading later that it is one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in Turin puts that atmosphere in context. One thing I remember is how tall the buildings were and how much they seemed to extend into each other, with long corridors that stretched as far as the eyes could see. I realised, eventually, that this isn’t a localised phenomenon but an Italian thing. Not just the buildings, by the way, but the roads too. Inspired by the military strategies of the Roman empire, most streets and buildings were built in such straight lines as to allow an observer to see as far ahead as possible from one location.

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The ride to the museum was as bumpy as most tram rides are, and sufficiently contrastive with both the earlier ride in a private vehicle and a typical city commute in another familiar city many thousands of miles away. A recurring thought in the traveller’s head in moments like this is the extent of work that would be needed to modernise a city like Lagos to this level of infrastructural development. A tram, after all, is just a fancy name for a longer-than-usual bus that runs on a designated track and with electricity. A weightier matter on the mind was something of far greater significance that had happened just a few days prior: I’d lost my younger sister in Lagos to preventable maternal mortality and the Nigerian healthcare system. Every opportunity for interaction with things signifying of the continuation of life seemed satisfying enough even in their imperfection.

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It makes sense now, everything already said about loss and the perspective it brings. Being far away from the scene of grief, where nothing was ever going to remain as they were, was no consolation, and certainly no relief. So, going through the halls of the Egyptian Museum, travelling into the past where death and renewal were matters of natural law and importance only provided temporary but welcome succor. Sarcophagus, scrolls, mummified remains from hundreds of years ago still remaining intact in their exhibition cases spoke to far more than the ability of humans to preserve that which is no longer practically immediately useful, but also to the value of that pursuit itself, capable of revealing (or ennobling) something more about ourselves than about those already dead.

With over 30,000 artifacts, I often wondered how long it took to excavate much of the work currently exhibited in the museum. The first item received, according to Wikipedia, arrived almost 400 years ago. A more awe-inspiring question is about how much more of these types of work with spiritual-artistic significance from that ancient civilization is still left buried under the many ruins in today’s Egypt, and how much more they may still inspire us. And also, a little unnerving, what chance of survival would many of them have had they been left in their homeland rather than having been transported over the distance into this beautiful place in Turin. Perhaps many of these gods are glad to have been saved from the fanatic distress currently sweeping through the Middle East.

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The ride back to Crocetta was, perhaps, slightly more animated than introspective, as the aftermath of spending two hours staring through enchanting history. We had plenty to talk about, gifts purchased at the gift shop to compare, and promises to make that we would return here at a later date for a more thorough exploration of an exhibition that couldn’t possibly be properly enjoyed in less than two hours. Then we alighted from the tram and couldn’t find our car. We had got down at the wrong stop. Ten to fifteen minutes later, we found the car parked safely where we’d left it, at a location similar to all the other spots on all the other similarly-looking streets we’d had to walk through, sometimes terrified of staring groups of strangers, and sometimes nervous about LS and her daughter missing their flight.

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Having a street with so similarly-looking blocks of buildings, with very few (to a stranger) landmarks to help navigate, it turns out, had its negatives.

Through Crocetta was published on August 6th, 2016, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Opinion, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

A Day in Turin

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Image of the “face” on the Shroud of Turin from CatholicDigest.com

My impression of Turin, from never having ever visited it, was limited to an article in the Reader’s Digest from 1984 called The Shroud of Mystery by J.H Heller. Not just an article, however, but a specific image of a piece of linen cloth with an imprint of a face said to belong to none other than Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Reading the piece as a young teenager in the early 90s Ìbàdàn was as exciting as it was disturbing. Having the pleasures of discovering reading as a worthwhile endeavour come with the unpleasant imprinting of an intriguing yet disturbing image didn’t seem at the time like a fair deal compared to all the fun my other friends were having. It compensated later, if only slightly, by the usual pleasures that reading brings (learning the meaning of “shroud”, for instance) and the stimulating dimension of that particular story: after Jesus died and was wrapped up, his body fluids/sweat/embalming liquids ensured that the outline of his face and body left indelible marks on the covering shroud. The result was this Shroud of Turin, hundreds of years old, showing the outline of a dead man with puncture marks on his wrists, blood marks on other parts of his body, etc, which the article suggested proved the biblical story to be true and intriguing scholars and theologians forever.

IMG_5667IMG_5669IMG_5668IMG_5682Recent carbon dating on the cloth has now rendered that conclusion false. The shroud shows a dead man alright, but it certainly wasn’t the Jesus, unless Jesus was born in the 1000s – 1300s.These scientific discoveries haven’t slowed down the perception of the cloth as being divinely ordered, however, as people still spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to see it either as a tourist curiosity or as a religious symbol. In any case, the deed was done: this famous death-mask of a man from many years ago continued to add an unwanted dimension to my teenage nightmares.

IMG_5740Whenever I heard of Turin from then on, all that came to my mind was the image of that shroud – a holdover of idolatory in European Christianity, perhaps, as an item significance to validate one’s faith, and to hold on to for as long as possible, generating tomes of research articles, arguments, and tourism dollars in the process. In any case, I’ve always wanted to see it for myself. So when I found myself bound for Italy earlier in the year, one of the places I wanted to visit was Turin. I was in luck, as these things have often turned out for me: my plane into Italy was to land in Turin, from where I would be moved by car to Ostana, just two hours away. Even if that individual trip didn’t provide enough opportunity to explore the city, its relative closeness to my destination meant something of even purely nominal significance.

torinoThere was also something else that I’ve always connected to Turin, but that came much recently: a 2008 movie by Clint Eastwood, set in America, and featuring a cranky old Midwesterner and his Hmong neighbours. It was called Gran Torino, named after a Ford car of the same name, which had got its name from the Italian pronunciation of Turin. Both the movie, with its story of redemption, personal sacrifice and cooperation and its soundtrack, possessed a kind of sublime beauty that was also notably memorable. According to Wikipedia, ‘the car was named after the city of Turin considered “the Italian Detroit”.’

So, it already began to seem – right from the beginning of my trip to Italy, that a number of my travel obsessions would collide with appropriate reality on the ground.

That didn’t happen, however.

The Shroud, it turns out, now comes out only once in a couple of years. Perhaps due to wear, or due to a need to create scarcity so that each outing, like of a notable masquerade, is special and memorable, those in charge of the piece of cloth only show it off once in a couple of years. And whenever that happens, according to residents, it is like a carnival: the city is full of tourists, pilgrims, and all curious visitors of all sorts, all trying to get a glimpse of the memorable fabric, and ready to pay whatever the gate fee is required at the time. “You should consider yourself lucky,” a friend said “that you aren’t here during that time. The city would be too busy for you to enjoy. And the lines to see the shroud are always very long and you have to book in advance.” It was probably all for the better.

IMG_5675IMG_5750 IMG_5754 IMG_5722IMG_5696 IMG_5703 IMG_5704IMG_5752What I was rewarded with in the end was something more: a whole day spent exploring another part of Torino which I hadn’t heard of until my trip. The city, it turns out, boasts of the second biggest Egyptian museum in the world: the Museo Egizio, which hosts more than 30,000 artifacts and receiving over half a million visitors last year alone. More on this later.

That, and a memorable commute all the way from Ostana through the city of Turin in delightful company, getting lost, interacting at close quarters with a small but stimulating company, rushing through an expansive exhibition at the museum in less than two short hours, another commute to the airport to drop off (and pick up) a guest, a stopover at Barge (a midway point) for delightful pizza, and then a quiet ride home.

Without the shroud, it was still a most charming introduction to a city of so many mysteries. Perhaps more so because of its welcome absence.

A Day in Turin was published on August 3rd, 2016, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.