Nineteenth century Turin filled with boys who had come in from the countryside for factory work and had nowhere to go on a Sunday. John Bosco, ordained in 1841, began by gathering them for games and instruction in whatever yard would have them, was moved on repeatedly, and eventually established a permanent oratory in the Valdocco district with workshops, a school and a printing press. What he built into a religious congregation in 1859 was a method as much as an institution: constant presence among the boys, prevention rather than punishment, and a combination of reason, religion and affection that he set out in a short essay still used in Salesian schools.
The Salesians became one of the largest Catholic orders in the world, running technical schools and youth work on every continent, and Turin holds the mother house and the great basilica of Mary Help of Christians that Bosco built for it.
The same city holds one of the most important collections of ancient Egyptian material outside Egypt, formed from the acquisitions of a Piedmontese consul and opened as a museum in 1824. Among its holdings are the intact tomb goods of an architect and his wife, and papyri including a fragmentary king list of the New Kingdom and the funerary manuscript from which a nineteenth century scholar numbered the spells of the Book of the Dead, a numbering Egyptologists still use.