Giardini Reali

Behind Turin's Royal Palace stretch the Royal Gardens, roughly seven hectares of greenery first laid out for the Savoy court. Comprising the ducal garden, the Green Bastion and the East Garden with its Fountain of the Tritons, they are a green part of the Royal Museums complex.

Why it matters

The Savoy reserved the land north and east of their residence for gardens framed by the old city bastions. The gardens form a coherent green ensemble of about seven hectares at the centre of the dense northern Italian capital, with the ducal layout still legible beneath later layers. They form part of the Royal Museums complex, shelter the Orangerie range along their edge, and contain sculpture and planting. Their paths connect Piazza Castello with the riverside quarters, within a landscape that combines a royal and civic history.

What to notice

The layout divides into three principal sectors. The Ducal Garden, beside the palace, keeps its regular, formal character, now refreshed by a contemporary fountain at its centre. The Green Bastion is a small pavilion with a sloping roof set on the old fortifications, looking out over the Boschetto, the grove whose nineteenth-century design includes an installation by the Turin artist Giulio Paolini. The East Garden is the largest, its long tree-lined avenues converging on the Fountain of the Tritons, sculpted by Simone Martinez around 1757, the garden's monumental centrepiece. Botanically, the avenues run under plane trees, lime trees and horse chestnuts; among them stands a rare weeping beech from the late nineteenth century, counted among the oldest and most majestic specimens in Piedmont. The boundary walls and bastions belong to the old city defences, making the garden a palimpsest of fortress, court and public park.

Context and history

The gardens grew with the palace they serve. Laid out as a formal ducal garden for the court's promenades and display, they occupied the strip between the Royal Palace and the sixteenth-seventeenth-century city walls, whose bastions still enclose the ground on the north and east. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the ensemble was enriched — the Orangerie range for wintering citrus, Martinez's Tritons fountain around 1757, and the romanticised grove planting of the 1800s. After the palace passed to the Italian state following unification, the gardens became part of the Royal Museums complex, which also includes the Royal Palace, Armoury, Savoy Gallery, Royal Library, Museum of Antiquities and Chapel of the Holy Shroud.