Drovetti « - Altair4 Multimedia S.r.l.

A Piedmontese between Italy and France.

On 2 July 1798, Napoleon’s fleet landed at Alexandria and launched a campaign of conquest that was to last, with changing fortunes, for three years, until 17 October 1801, when General Menou left Egypt aboard a British frigate.
The military expedition had been accompanied by a large group of “savants”, experts in a wide variety of disciplines who were given the task of investigating every aspect of the conquered country. Out of their work came the splendid volumes of the “Description de l’Égypte”, published between 1809 and 1828. These would reveal to the whole world the wonders of a country that had long been admired but about which little had actually been known. And the Egyptian expedition, through the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, was eventually to lead to the decipherment of hieroglyphs and open the way for the discipline of Egyptology.

This is the background to the story of Bernardino Drovetti, a citizen of Piedmont who was made Consul General of France in Egypt in 1811. This complex personality was a soldier, a diplomat and a researcher into Egyptian antiquities, the same antiquities that would constitute the nucleus of the Egyptian Museum of Turin but which were also to find their way into many other European museums, and the Louvre in particular.