Porta Palatina

Beside Turin's cathedral, two tall brick towers and a double gateway survive from the walled Roman colony founded two thousand years ago. Porta Palatina was the northern entrance to Augusta Taurinorum. Its position reflects the grid plan of the Roman city.

Why it matters

Turin began as a Roman colony laid out on a strict rectangular grid inside a fortified wall, and Porta Palatina is one of the best-preserved remains of that foundation. It was one of four monumental gates, one on each side of the enclosure, and it guarded the northern end of the cardo maximus, the main street running through the city towards the river. MuseoTorino, the city museum's online catalogue, describes it as one of the best-preserved urban gates of the early imperial period. The gate remains part of the urban fabric between the cathedral and Porta Palazzo, where the Roman street grid still informs Turin's historic centre.

What to notice

• The two polygonal brick towers flanking the gate, which rise well above the line of the old wall and dominate the little archaeological park of the Torri Palatine.
• The double-arched gateway openings, oriented on the ancient cardo maximus, whose line is continued today by via San Tommaso and via Porta Palatina — the alignment is visible on the ground.
• The bronze statues of the emperor Augustus and of Julius Caesar beside the towers. They are not ancient: the City of Turin's district office records that they date to 1934.
• The stretch of Roman wall incorporated into later buildings around the park, including the remains near the cathedral, which show how the colony's defences were reused for centuries.
• The gate's position in the Roman grid, still reflected in the streets of the historic centre.

Context and history

The colony that became Turin was founded under Augustus, probably between 25 and 15 BC, and built to the classic canons of Roman town planning: a rectangular grid of perpendicular streets wrapped in a curtain wall, with a monumental gate at the centre of each of its four sides. The northern gate — recorded in Roman times as Porta Principalis Dextera — looked out towards the road linking Mediolanum (Milan) with Ticinum (Pavia), so most travellers arriving from the Po Valley entered the city here. Its current name derives from the medieval "Porta Palatii", the gate of the palace, reflecting its later position beside the bishops' and lords' precinct that grew up near the cathedral. Over the centuries the gate was absorbed into successive fortifications and came close to demolition before modern restoration campaigns secured it as the city's principal Roman monument. Today it sits at the heart of the Parco archeologico delle Torri Palatine, with the remains of the Roman theatre near Palazzo Reale, and together the two form one of the most concentrated ancient sites in any northern Italian city centre.