Parco Naturale La Mandria

A kingdom of forest hides behind a wall you can walk beside for hours. Parco Naturale La Mandria, founded in 1978 on the former Savoy hunting estate, protects the most substantial surviving portion of the lowland forest that once covered northern Italy, inside a historic wall of about thirty kilometres, with red deer and a royal castle at its heart.

Why it matters

The park is what remains of the hunting landscape that gave Venaria Reale its reason to exist — and its survival is almost an accident of royal privacy. To protect the estate he created for himself and Rosa Vercellana, Vittorio Emanuele II enclosed thousands of hectares behind a perimeter wall of roughly thirty kilometres in the mid-nineteenth century — an enclosure so extensive that it is often described as the largest walled park in Europe after Chambord. That wall, built to keep the world out, preserved one of the last substantial pieces of the lowland forest that once covered the Po Valley. The park that regional law created in 1978 has grown into the green counterpart to the baroque Reggia; its managing body, Ente di gestione delle aree protette dei Parchi Reali, keeps its headquarters in Venaria itself.

What to notice

The wall is the monument: a nineteenth-century royal boundary that today functions as an ecological rampart. Inside the fenced area, the landscape alternates open meadow and dense lowland woodland where red deer live wild — the autumn rut, or bramito, is part of the park's wildlife cycle. Wolves are present in the wider protected area, a sign of how functional this ecosystem has become, alongside squirrels, hedgehogs and a rich birdlife that the authority's birdwatching programme targets. The cascine, historic farmsteads scattered through the estate, explain how this landscape was worked as a living agricultural community well into the twentieth century. The Castello della Mandria stands inside the enclosure as the estate's architectural centrepiece.

Context and history

The land belonged to the Savoy hunting system long before the wall: the estate fed the hunts that gave Venaria its name from the later seventeenth century. In the mid-1800s Vittorio Emanuele II walled the core of the estate to shield the private residence he shared with Rosa Vercellana, the "Bela Rosin" whose name survives in local toponymy. After the king's death the property passed in 1882 to the Medici del Vascello marquises, who kept its character, and for decades the estate functioned as a small self-contained community with its own churches, schools and services. In 1976 part of the estate was sold to the Regione Piemonte, and regional law no. 54 of 21 August 1978 created the park. The park spans more than 6,500 hectares across six municipalities, is designated under the Natura 2000 network and contains the UNESCO-listed castle.