Palazzo Carignano

Palazzo Carignano is the curving brick palace where Vittorio Emanuele II was born and the first Italian Parliament convened. Guarini's undulating Baroque facade and the palace's political history connect it with the Risorgimento Museum housed within the complex.

Why it matters

The palace was the residence of the princes of Carignano, a cadet branch of the House of Savoy, and it was here in 1820 that the future King Vittorio Emanuele II — the first king of a united Italy — was born. In 1861 the first Italian Parliament met in a temporary hall erected in the palace courtyard, where Cavour, Garibaldi, Massimo d'Azeglio and their contemporaries debated the new state. Guarini's facade is composed of bowed brick volumes in a convex-concave rhythm. As part of the Savoy Residences it carries UNESCO World Heritage status, and its walls house the National Museum of the Italian Risorgimento, the principal museum dedicated to Italy's unification.

What to notice

The central block, built for Prince Emanuele Filiberto of Carignano from the late 1670s, swells and recedes in sinuous brickwork; Guarini composed the windows, masks and balconies into a surface that seems elastic. The broken pediment over the main portal is crowned by a terracotta chariot group. The nineteenth-century annex, designed by Domenico Ferri and facing Piazza Carlo Alberto, presents a sober neoclassical face. The museum's Sala del primo Parlamento commemorates the chamber used by Italy's first Parliament in 1861. The elliptical staircase attributed to Guarini survives in the older wing, and period interiors recall the palace's princely life before politics took over.

Context and history

Construction of the baroque core began in 1679 under Prince Emanuele Filiberto of Carignano, who engaged the Theatine architect and mathematician Guarino Guarini to replace the family's earlier residence. Guarini worked on the palace into the 1680s, and the interior refinement continued over the following decades; the young future king was born here in 1820. By the mid-nineteenth century the House of Carignano had become the main Savoy line, and the palace's political moment arrived with unification: the Subalpine Parliament met here from the late 1840s, and after 1861 the Chamber of Deputies of the new Kingdom of Italy sat in a temporary hall erected in the courtyard until the capital moved to Florence in 1864 — the grand annex facing Piazza Carlo Alberto, built from 1863 to Ferri's design, was finished only in 1871 and never served the parliament. Carlo Alberto had already ceded the palace to the state in 1831; the parliamentary hall was declared a national monument in 1898, and the Risorgimento museum settled permanently on the piano nobile in the late 1930s, now presenting an entirely renewed route across thirty halls. The palace's inclusion in the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy UNESCO listing (1997) recognised it as part of the Savoy state's ceremonial architecture.