Venice extended toward the East and the Holy Land, where its ships convoyed pilgrims on the route to Jerusalem via Alexandria. A memory of the knowledge of those lands, which originated also from the experience of the travelers who visited it, remains even in Saint Mark’s Basilica’s mosaics. The lagoon city has a many-centuried relation with Egypt, due to the  Venetian commercial interests in that country. This relation contributed to feed curiosity for pharaonic antiquities, which started to be collected by Venetian diplomats stationed in the East, for example in Constantinople.
There began an antique collecting including Egyptian pieces, whose growth is linked to leading figures in the 18th century but was an animated phenomenon also in the following century, as Teodoro Correr’s collection still proves.