Palazzo Reale

The Royal Palace of Turin was the stage on which the House of Savoy rehearsed, and then performed, kingship. Built from 1584 beside the ducal castle, enlarged by the dynasty's great architects, it became the Turin seat of the Kingdom of Italy's sovereign in 1861. Today its state apartments, gallery and staircases form the centrepiece of the Musei Reali complex.

Why it matters

When Vittorio Amedeo II was raised from duke to king in 1713, this was the palace that carried the title — and when the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, the palace became a residence of its first sovereign. The building began in 1584 under Carlo Emanuele I with Ascanio Vitozzi as architect, on the site of the bishop's palace facing the medieval castle, and successive generations refashioned it: Amedeo di Castellamonte extended the body of the palace, Filippo Juvarra added the command-area complex and staircases, Benedetto Alfieri reworked the interiors, and Pelagio Palagi redecorated for King Carlo Albert in the nineteenth century, adding the monumental Scalone d'onore of 1862. As the principal urban residence of the Savoy dynasty it anchors the UNESCO-listed Residences of the Royal House of Savoy, and today it is the heart of the Musei Reali, the single state museum circuit that joins palace, armoury, library, picture gallery and antiquities.

What to notice

Start in the piano nobile, where the state rooms carry carved and gilded ceilings with allegorical canvases by Flemish and Lombard painters of the seventeenth century, among them Jan Miel and Charles Dauphin. The Daniel Gallery is the signature room: a long gallery overlooking the royal gardens, its vault frescoed in 1688 by Daniel Seyter with an illusionistic ceiling that rewards standing still and looking straight up. On the ground floor, the apartments restored under Carlo Albert show Palagi's eclectic nineteenth-century taste, while the Scalone d'onore — the stair of honour of 1862 — announces the palace's final, royal maturity. Do not miss the sequence Juvarra conceived as the palace's working heart, the "command area" of secretariats, state archive and a small court theatre. Through the windows, the Giardini Reali unfold in the formal and English manner, framing the palace against the Alps on clear days — a designed view, not an accident.

Context and history

The palace's site was chosen for proximity to power: beside the Palazzo Madama castle at the centre of Piazza Castello, replacing the bishop's residence. Vitozzi's project of 1584 gave the dynasty a coherent urban palace; Castellamonte carried it forward through the seventeenth century; and the interiors were continually renewed as Turin grew from ducal seat to royal capital. Juvarra's early-eighteenth-century interventions accompanied the kingdom's creation, and Alfieri's mid-century work completed the ceremonial plan. With Vittorio Amedeo II's elevation in 1713 the palace became a royal residence in title as well as scale, and after 1861 it stood as a principal residence of the new Kingdom of Italy, though the capital's move to Florence in 1865 and then Rome diminished its residential role. The palace passed to the Italian state with the Republic in 1946, was progressively opened as a museum, and now operates within the Musei Reali circuit, its gardens and adjacent galleries forming an extensive cultural complex at the heart of the city.