The exhibition Treasures of the Pharaohs (here is our review), hosted at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome since Oct. 24, 2025 and subsequently extended by more than a month due to the high number of visitors, recorded more than 400,000 total admissions, placing it among the most visited exhibitions in the history of the Roman institution and among the Scuderie’s major exhibition successes in recent years.
The attendance figure is accompanied by a significant incidence of young audiences. About 60,000 visitors were male and female students, including more than 40,000 from elementary school. Added to this is a further notable element: 20 percent of the non-school audience turned out to be under 30. The origin of the visitors also indicates a strong national and international appeal, with 60 percent of the audience coming from Rome and Lazio and the remaining 40 percent from other Italian regions and abroad.
The data were presented at the Scuderie del Quirinale by Fabio Tagliaferri, president of Ales S.p.A., Matteo Lafranconi, director of the Scuderie del Quirinale, and Simone Todorow, managing director of MondoMostre. During the meeting, the next development of the exhibition project on an international scale was also announced, which will bring the exhibition to the United States after the Roman closure scheduled for June 14, 2026.
The North American tour will take in two museum venues. The first will be the de Young Museum in San Francisco, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where the exhibition will be on view from August 1, 2026 to January 31, 2027. The initiative is co-organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco together with the Kimbell Art Museum and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Supreme Council of Antiquities, with the collaboration of Ales S.p.A. and MondoMostre. The California exhibit will present the entire scholarly core already on display in Rome, amounting to 130 artifacts, including artifacts never before exhibited in North America.
The second stop will be the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, scheduled from March 14 to September 19, 2027. The museum, among the most significant institutions in the United States, is housed in an architectural venue articulated between the 1972 design by Louis I. Kahn and the 2013 pavilion designed by Renzo Piano. The Texas presentation will take place right in the Renzo Piano Pavilion, in a museum setting known for a permanent collection that includes works by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Velázquez, Monet and Picasso.
The exhibition project is divided into six thematic sections,The Treasures of the Pharaohs, The People Around the Pharaohs, Religion and Beliefs, Everyday Life, The City of Gold, and Death and Afterlife. The itinerary offers a comprehensive reading of Egyptian civilization, from the dimension of royal power to aspects of daily life and funerary practices. Works considered central to the international presentation include the golden funerary mask of Amenemope, the sarcophagus of Tuya and the carved schist Triad of Mycerinus. For North American audiences, it will also be the first opportunity to view artifacts from the so-called Golden City of Amenhotep III, discovered in 2021 by Zahi Hawass, which have never before been exhibited on the continent.
The Roman project presented 130 masterpieces from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Luxor Museum, many of them exhibited for the first time outside Egypt. It was curated by Tarek El Awady, former director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, while production was handled by ALES - Art Work and Services of the Ministry of Culture together with MondoMostre, in collaboration with the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt and with the support of the relevant Egyptian ministries and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
The project also received the patronage of the Lazio Region and the scientific collaboration of the Egyptian Museum of Turin. The support of main sponsors Intesa Sanpaolo and ENI, along with EgyptAir as the official carrier and partners Cotral, Urban Vision Group, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane and Vivaticket, contributed to the realization of the initiative. The catalog and guidebooks were published by Allemandi with texts edited by Zahi Hawass, while the program of meetings and insights was developed with the SARAS Department of Sapienza University of Rome.
The visitor experience was supported by an audioguide system included in the ticket, with Roberto Giacobbo’s voice for the Italian version and Zahi Hawass’s voice for the English version, supporting an informative layout geared toward content accessibility. The exhibition path traversed some of the most relevant evidence of pharaonic art, from funerary furnishings such as the sarcophagus of Psusennes I and the Necklace of the Golden Flies, to ritual practices related to the afterlife, to monumental works such as Hatshepsut in the act of offering, the dyad of Thutmosi III with Amun and the Triad of Mycerinus. The conclusion of the Roman tour was entrusted to the Isiac Canteen of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, an element that symbolically related the Egyptian and Roman traditions.
Also presented during the conference was the Virtual Tour of the exhibition, which joins the digital projects already created for Napoli Ottocento, Barocco Globale and Barocco Globale Kids. The tours will be available from June 15 on the websites of the Scuderie del Quirinale and Ales S.p.A. The digital initiative is part of a strategy to broaden accessibility, with the goal of transforming a temporary event into a heritage that can be consulted at a distance. The Virtual Tour is intended to reach an extended audience, including students, researchers and users unable to physically visit the exhibition.
“To record 400,000 visitors is an immense emotion,” said Fabio Tagliaferri, president of Ales S.p.A. “But the life of this exhibition does not end in Rome. The Pharaohs are flying overseas, to San Francisco and Fort Worth; and from today, the Scuderie del Quirinale’s ’Global Baroque’ and ’Naples Ottocento’ exhibitions become permanent thanks to the new Virtual Tour, the result of a rigorous investment in rights management to offer a total immersive experience to students, scholars and enthusiasts from around the world.”
"We are particularly proud of the success of Treasures of the Pharaohs, an exhibition that has managed to combine an extraordinary public response with a strong scientific, cultural and popular value,“ added Simone Todorow, CEO of MondoMostre. ”The great participation of schools, young people and families, through guided tours, educational activities and workshops, confirms the project’s ability to also be an important formative and educational moment, thanks to the undoubted attraction that the richness of the heritage of ancient Egypt has always aroused. Our heartfelt thanks go to Ales and the Scuderie del Quirinale: key partners with whom it has been possible to realize, under the sign of public-private collaboration, an exhibition of such importance. After Rome, the project now continues in the United States: the U.S. debut of ’Treasures of the Pharaohs’ at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, to be followed by a stop at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, represents another extraordinary achievement and the crowning achievement of a complex and ambitious international cultural operation, co-produced by MondoMostre in close synergy with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt, the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Kimbell Art Museum and an Italian institutional reality of excellence such as Ales. The hope is that the tour can continue beyond the planned second stop in Texas."
"In addition to being one of the biggest successes with the public, Treasures of the Pharaohs was also the longest-running exhibition in the history of the Scuderie del Quirinale, registering an extraordinary and constant appreciation that has been confirmed even during the six-week extension," says Matteo Lafranconi, Director of the Scuderie del Quirinale.
"Treasures of the Pharaohs will leave one breathless. From the scale and splendor of some of the artifacts on display to the revelations about everyday life, visitors will find this exhibition brilliant, both visually and intellectually," says Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.
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| "Treasures of the Pharaohs" exhibition flies to the U.S. after record in Rome |
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