Palazzo Muratori Cravetta

Along via Jerusalem, once lined with painted façades, Palazzo Muratori Cravetta preserves a Renaissance courtyard and a painted room where Duke Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy died in 1630. The palace layers French kings, Holy Roman Emperors and ducal ceremony into a single noble residence.

Why it matters

The present palace was formed by merging three noble properties — the Corvo, Tapparelli and Muratori households — and its roll call of guests is remarkable: Francis I of France stayed here in 1515 and Emperor Charles V in 1536. Its definitive form is the work of Giovanni Francesco I Cravetta, First President of the ducal Senate, completed by his nephew Giovanni Francesco II; around 1620 Duke Vittorio Amedeo I chose the palace as his residence. In 1630 Duke Carlo Emanuele I died in a ground-floor room, attended by his subject and confidant Alessandro III Cravetta — the same room, with its coffered ceiling, survives.

What to notice

The cortile d'onore is the centrepiece: the late-Renaissance courtyard brings painting, sculpture and architecture together in a classical space, the work of Ercole Negri di Sanfront, enriched around 1624 with frescoes by Francesco and Costanzo Arbaudi and stuccoes by Bartolomeo Rusca, known for his work at the Certosa di Pesio. In the niches stand twelve busts of princes and princesses of the House of Savoy. On the inner façade, trompe-l'oeil figures peer from painted windows.

The ducal chamber has a coffered ceiling decorated with some 160 painted wooden panels carrying coats of arms of noble families, figures, animals and scenes of everyday life in a late-medieval taste — the panels date to the 1470s, earlier than the room's role in 1630. The Mannerist street façade on via Jerusalem once displayed a painted series of the months of the year interspersed with busts and statues. Behind the palace lies a small Italian garden, reconstructed in 2006 under the Interreg Alcotra "Jardins des Alpes" project on a design drawn from Renaissance and Mannerist treatises — box parterre with central santolina, enclosed by hornbeam palissades.

Context and history

The construction campaign is placed between about 1606 and 1624, with work presumed finished around 1620, the year Vittorio Amedeo I took up residence. The street frontage's triumphal-arch schema and painted attic once served as scenography for private theatre in the garden — the palace was built for representation. Restoration has preserved the building's architectural fabric. The street itself recalls that processions once passed between the Collegiata of Sant'Andrea and the church of San Domenico along a lane lined with painted façades.