Palazzo Madama - Museo Civico d'Arte Antica

Palazzo Madama is two thousand years of Turin stacked in a single building: the towers of a Roman gate, a medieval castle, the apartments of two royal Madamas and Filippo Juvarra's dazzling baroque facade. Inside, the Museo Civico d'Arte Antica guides you chronologically upward, from the medieval undercroft to the decorated piano nobile.

Why it matters

No other building in Turin compresses the city's history so legibly. The palace grew around the eastern gate of the Roman colony, whose two towers still rise at its corners; in the Middle Ages it became a fortified castle, reshaped in the fourteenth century by the princes of Acaja; and from the 1640s it was the residence of the two Madama Reali, the royal widows who gave it its name. Juvarra's white stone facade of 1718–1721, conceived as a ceremonial backdrop for the new kingdom proclaimed to Vittorio Amedeo II, is the baroque mask over all of it. After unification the building served as the first seat of the Italian Senate, and since 1934 it has housed the Museo Civico d'Arte Antica, reopened in 2006 with a celebrated route through medieval sculpture, painting and one of Europe's major decorative-arts collections. The palace forms part of the Savoy Residences UNESCO World Heritage listing.

What to notice

Read the building from the outside first: Juvarra's facade has a tall ground storey, a columned middle order and a carved balustrade, but — look closely — it is only one room deep, a theatrical screen attached to the older castle behind it, whose medieval brick towers punctuate the corners of Piazza Castello. Inside, the visit climbs through the building's layers. The moat and undercroft display medieval sculpture and the precious Gothic rooms, including the courtly Sala del Papiniano with its fifteenth-century frescoes. The baroque staircase by Juvarra spirals up to the piano nobile, where the Chinese Cabinet and the Flower Cabinet — lacquered, mirrored, glass-pasted confections of the eighteenth century — are the palace's most photographed interiors. The art collections include Antonello da Messina's Portrait of a Man, and the top floor surveys European decorative arts: glass, ceramics, ivories, textiles. From the upper windows the whole of Piazza Castello arranges itself around you.

Context and history

The site began as the fortress protecting the Roman colony's eastern gate, and its medieval story accelerated under the Acaja princes in the fourteenth century, who turned the castle toward residential use; fifteenth-century work added towers and gardens. French occupation in the sixteenth century was followed by the palace's Savoy golden age: from the 1640s it housed first Cristina of France and then Marie Jeanne Baptiste of Savoy-Nemours, the second Madama Reale, whose apartment artists decorated in a deliberate mixture of styles. Between 1713 and 1714 the main hall was refitted to celebrate Vittorio Amedeo II's elevation from duke to king, and Juvarra's facade followed from 1718. The nineteenth century saw the building pass through institutional roles — astronomical observatory, royal gallery — before the Subalpine Senate was inaugurated in its hall, the body that in 1861 became the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy. Allied bombing damaged the palace on 13 August 1943; post-war recovery led to the museum's establishment and, after the 2006 refurbishment, to the layered chronological display visible today.