In A Night in the Egyptian Museum, journalist Alberto Angela takes us on a tour of Turin’s amazing collection after the tourists are gone. Plus, the museum director, Christian Greco, hangs out with us and deciphers some Egyptian hieroglyphics.

No kidding. He actually reads them like they’re the newspaper!

Getting close to 2,000-year-old (and older) antiquities raises more questions than it answers about Egyptian people and culture. There’s a haunting sequence toward the end of the doc: a montage of images of wooden portraits that were placed in sarcophagi on top of mummies’ heads. What’s so jarring about them is how modern and real they look – like faces you could see on the street today.

The bulk of the Turin collection was assembled during the Egyptology craze of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, and is considered the best outside of Cairo. The French scholar and Egyptology founding father, Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) quipped, “the road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin.” Watch A Night in the Egyptian Museum and see for yourself!