Coronavirus, sanitize the pharaohs’ headphones too: the exhibition on Tutankhamun opens at the Royal Palace

For all men except for Pharaoh, considered a sort of divinity, who renounced immortality to make his “journey beyond darkness” night after night. At Palazzo Reale culture starts again. Respecting the restrictions imposed by the government ordinance, today the exhibition opens without inauguration – and not even a press conference – welcoming the public with contingent entrances that guarantee the “courtesy” distance and a maximum of ten visitors per room, distributing sanitized headphones in a continuous cycle by diligent custodians armed with disinfectant spray. Because without it, it wouldn’t make sense to even enter. Indeed the beauty of the route is precisely the story – documented but not notionistic – which begins after crossing the first door with an introduction on Egyptian civilization and its burial rituals.

The exhibition begins in a traditional way, with a small collection of archaeological departments of the Milanese Civic Collections and of the Archaeological Museum of Florence composed of statuettes, papyri, reliefs, engravings and canopic jars where the bowels of the dead were kept, belonging to the compound funeral supplies of indispensable and voluptuous objects. Among these, the Busca Kit stands out, exhibited for the first time in full, purchased in the 19th century by the Marquis Carlo Arconati Busca Visconti today in the civic collections of Milan: a male mummy of unknown origin, a sarcophagus divided into two parts that do not belong to the same person, and a wonderful papyrus 7 meters long, datable to the XIX-XX dynasty and preserved in the archive of the Maggiore Hospital of Milan.The first part ends with another jewel, the statue of the god Amun loaned by the Fritz Beherens Foundation, known for having the appearance of the young Tutankhamun, the most famous of the Egyptian pharaohs, who died in 1323 BC. at the age of 19, the only sovereign whose tomb has so far been found perfectly intact with the famous mask and over 5000 objects of refined workmanship, usually at home in the Cairo Museum, these days the heart of a traveling exhibition currently in London that last year in Paris reached a record 1.5 million visitors. The second part of the exhibition, entirely virtual, is dedicated to Tutankhamun: in the first room, the adventure of the archaeologist Howard Carter is told, who in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings made the greatest archaeological discovery ever, bringing to light the tomb of the sovereign, in a purely immersive second, Tutankhamun will guide the public on their journey beyond the darkness through “50 projectors installed in the rooms that slide the scenes of the story on the walls – explains Sandro Vannini of Laboratoriorosso – A narration for images, music and words built thanks to an archive that I built in 20 years of work “.