Collezioni Egittologiche dell'Università di Pisa

The Collezioni Egittologiche dell'Università di Pisa opens not with grand Egyptian myth, but with a lineage of people and a precise moment in 1962 when the collection began to take tangible shape. The first spark came from Laura Birga Picozzi, a descendant of Ippolito Rosellini, the Italian pioneer of Egyptian studies who helped guide the famed Franco-Tuscan expedition in 1828–1829. Picozzi’s initial donation in 1962 tethered a private collection to the academic life of Pisa, and in doing so, linked an intimate family chronicle to a wider scholarly enterprise.

From that modest start, the collection grew through a second pivotal gift in 1964: Michela Schiff Giorgini’s donation of approximately four hundred objects, acquired from excavations conducted in the Sudan under the University of Pisa’s sponsorship. This early expansion is crucial because it situates the collection within a broader European archaeology of the Nile, not as a static vault of relics but as an evolving pedagogical instrument. The narrative of acquisition continues through the late 1960s, when the Ostraka di Ossirinco, a thousand five hundred terracotta writing-plate fragments—inscribed in Demotic and illustrating life in a small Roman-era oasis near Oxyrhynchus—joined the holdings in 1968.