Chiesa di San Lorenzo

The Royal Church of San Lorenzo has no facade of its own; its entrance opens directly from the palaces around Turin's royal square. Guarino Guarini designed the church around an interior crowned by a bold Baroque dome.

Why it matters

San Lorenzo is the royal church of the Savoy court and a major expression of Guarini's geometry. A Theatine priest, mathematician and architect, Guarini took charge of the building in 1668 and consecrated it himself in May 1680. The interior abandons the conventional longitudinal church: an octagon floats inside a square, side chapels turn independently around it, and the dome rides above on pendentives bearing the four Evangelists. It is a compact building, yet it rewrote what a church interior could do with structure and light.

The church also forms part of the Savoy architectural ensemble around the square, beside Palazzo Reale and the Musei Reali complex.

What to notice

The dome is a web of sixteen interlocking ribs forming an eight-pointed star around a central octagon, with eight elliptical windows pulling daylight down into the darkness below. The lantern rises roughly fifty metres above the floor. The window arrangement has long been nicknamed the devil's face by Turinese; its staged light contrasts with the deliberately dim entrance side.

On one side, the chapel of the Crucifix holds a Guarini altar from 1676 with a painting attributed to Andrea Pozzo; the Immacolata chapel, also designed by Guarini, hides a fresco of God the Father that direct sun strikes around the equinoxes at midday. On the other side, the Annunciazione chapel carries a marble group by Giuseppe Maria Carlone and, since a papal gift, an icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa. The high altar of 1680, its frontal recalling Emanuele Filiberto's battlefield vow, is considered among the most significant altars in northern Italy, and the pulpit was carved in 1752 by Stefano Maria Clemente from a single walnut trunk.

A faithful copy of the Shroud of Turin is displayed near the sacristy, where a small didactic museum of the Sindone opened in 2010. A bell tradition established in 1983 commemorates the ten divisions of the Italian campaign in Russia during the Second World War.

Context and history

The origins lie in a battlefield promise. On 10 August 1557, the feast of St Lawrence, Duke Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy fought alongside Philip II of Spain at the Battle of San Quintino; both rulers vowed churches to the saint in victory. Philip built the Escorial. Emanuele Filiberto reworked Turin's ducal chapel and rededicated it to San Lorenzo in 1562, and the church later became the Turin seat of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus. During the first public ostension of the Holy Shroud in 1578, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo celebrated here, with the poet Torquato Tasso present.

The present building grew from a campaign begun in 1634 with designs involving Ascanio Vitozzi and Carlo di Castellamonte, before Guarini's radical revision of 1667 replaced the Latin cross with the central octagonal plan. Work ran from 1668 to consecration in 1680. Guarini drew a facade, but it was never built, reportedly because a freestanding front would have broken the symmetry Duke Carlo Emanuele II wanted for his new square. RAF bombing on the night of 13 July 1943 damaged the church, which was subsequently restored.